Notes on the Perfidy of Dashboards • Hacker News Board

Re: Notes on the Perfidy of Dashboards

#21

Post by kfarr » Fri, Aug 27, 2021, 5:02 PM UTC

reureu wrote: post #12

I spent the past four years working as a data scientist for a healthcare company on population health initiatives, and started building out a body of research around how to engage clinicians using data (among other things, through dashboards). That's a bit different than the article, but one of my key learnings was that dashboards are often incredibly ineffective and only promulgated by well-intentioned engineers, ba…

Curious if you have any examples of "Non-dashboard approaches" to compare and contrast?

Re: Notes on the Perfidy of Dashboards

#22

Post by mdoms » Fri, Aug 27, 2021, 5:04 PM UTC

cratermoon wrote: post #16

SkipperCat wrote: post #8

Dashboards are invaluable. Humans can intake a lot of data from images and there is not better way to grok data than a graph. We've spent a lot of time building Grafana dashboards and they've been extremely helpful with debugging. It doesn't solve all problems but it certainly helps narrow down where to look. Sure, we still look at log files, use htop and a lot of other tools, but our first stop is always Grafana. I…

> We've spent a lot of time building Grafana dashboards and they've been extremely helpful with debugging. It doesn't solve all problems but it certainly helps narrow down where to look. And then once the bugs that led to the creation of that dashboard are fixed or retired, what's left for that data? It just sits there with its pretty graphs and eye-catching visualizations to snare the unwary who are looking for help…

How do things like message queue sizes, transactions per second, errors per minute, memory usage etc become less useful after solving one bug?

Re: Notes on the Perfidy of Dashboards

#23

Post by tcard » Fri, Aug 27, 2021, 5:10 PM UTC

hbosch wrote: post #17

I read this and still don't know exactly what the author is asking for. Is an "exploratory, queryable interface" not exactly how you would describe a modern dashboard?

The author is asking for, and actually built, https://honeycomb.io.

Re: Notes on the Perfidy of Dashboards

#24

Post by tomrod » Fri, Aug 27, 2021, 5:15 PM UTC

I disagree strongly with the content.

But man, why is it designers thing light gray background with mid-gray text is a good idea? Almost unreadable for me.

Re: Notes on the Perfidy of Dashboards

#25

Post by ziggus » Fri, Aug 27, 2021, 5:17 PM UTC

Interesting that most of this rant is focused on static dashboards - does anyone really use static dashboards? I can see if you're stuck using 1998 technology like Excel that you might throw together some static charts/graphs/KPIs, but even in the most primitive dashboard tools available now (PowerBI, I'm looking at you) the default is a dashboard that's tied to a 'live' dataset.

Re: Notes on the Perfidy of Dashboards

#26

Post by ethbr0 » Fri, Aug 27, 2021, 5:18 PM UTC

drewcoo wrote: post #15

SkipperCat wrote: post #8

Dashboards are invaluable. Humans can intake a lot of data from images and there is not better way to grok data than a graph. We've spent a lot of time building Grafana dashboards and they've been extremely helpful with debugging. It doesn't solve all problems but it certainly helps narrow down where to look. Sure, we still look at log files, use htop and a lot of other tools, but our first stop is always Grafana. I…

A dashboard in a car gives you largely active feedback to help you drive. Mechanics' diagnostic tools give them a deep dive into information about repairing the vehicle, not limited to real time or to just driving activity. Those two things are very different. I don't think a debugging "dashboard" is a dashboard. That conflates two very different ideas. We need a different name for that.

"Pre-configured EDA"

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Exploratory_data_analysis

Re: Notes on the Perfidy of Dashboards

#27

Post by iamthepieman » Fri, Aug 27, 2021, 5:20 PM UTC

The most effective dashboards I've worked on have been glorified interactive spreadsheets with the ability to graph the data in various ways. High density, not pretty. Sometimes there was a map if the data was geospatial.

Also, does anyone remember the covid dashboard from John Hopkins. That one is pretty useful.

Re: Notes on the Perfidy of Dashboards

#28

Post by ethbr0 » Fri, Aug 27, 2021, 5:22 PM UTC

tetha wrote: post #11

SkipperCat wrote: post #8

Dashboards are invaluable. Humans can intake a lot of data from images and there is not better way to grok data than a graph. We've spent a lot of time building Grafana dashboards and they've been extremely helpful with debugging. It doesn't solve all problems but it certainly helps narrow down where to look. Sure, we still look at log files, use htop and a lot of other tools, but our first stop is always Grafana. I…

> We've spent a lot of time building Grafana dashboards and they've been extremely helpful with debugging. It doesn't solve all problems but it certainly helps narrow down where to look. This is what I was about to write. Most of our services have 1 or 2 dashboards showing some service KPIs - for example HTTP request throughputh and response time, and also interface metrics to other sub systems - queries to postgres,…

This is where dashboard have been most useful to me: extract and expose key metrics of the system, in as unbiased and raw of a form as possible.

Or, to put it another way, looking at a dashboard should tell you reliable facts about the system, that lead you to further exploration.

As the post puts it, "They’re great for getting a high level sense of system functioning, and tracking important stats over long intervals. They are a good starting point for investigations."

Dashboards should not attempt to interpret anything, without being very clear about how, why, and what they're doing.

Example: response time statistics vs "responsive green/red light"

If it's important enough to have logic built on top of it, that's an alert, and that's something different.

Re: Notes on the Perfidy of Dashboards

#29

Post by cwillu » Fri, Aug 27, 2021, 5:23 PM UTC

ziggus wrote: post #25

Interesting that most of this rant is focused on static dashboards - does anyone really use static dashboards? I can see if you're stuck using 1998 technology like Excel that you might throw together some static charts/graphs/KPIs, but even in the most primitive dashboard tools available now (PowerBI, I'm looking at you) the default is a dashboard that's tied to a 'live' dataset.

The "static" refers to the structure of the data, not the freshness/liveness of it.

Re: Notes on the Perfidy of Dashboards

#30

Post by devchix » Fri, Aug 27, 2021, 5:23 PM UTC

1. Set up some strawmen about dashboards

1a. Define dashboards in a way that suits your argument

2. Knock em down!

3. Profit?

This, https://status.cloud.google.com/, is a static dashboard. One can make up one's mind about its usefulness and function. A blunt example, but nobody I know "debugs" using dashboards.

Dashboard is automation, if you're against dashboards, you're against automation of repetitive, boring, long-winded, laborious, hard-to-remember, tasks. Dashboards aren't sacred, once one outlives its usefulness, get rid of it.