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Your Startup Needs a Dashboard

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Re: Your Startup Needs a Dashboard

#41

Post by pmjoyce »

michaelbuckbee wrote: post #39

If you're interested in doing this, two things that have previously helped me: Stashboard - Open source status monitor for elements of your infrastructure, run it on AppEngine http://www.stashboard.org/ GeckoBoard - Dashboard as a service - Can be coerced into creating whatever kind of charts/graphs you want on a slick looking board, but is set to do polling of data which is less helpful for system operations stuff,…

You can now push data to Geckoboard see http://docs.geckoboard.com/api/push.html

Disclosure: I'm one of the founders, thanks for the mention.

Re: Your Startup Needs a Dashboard

#42

Post by mcantor »

BryanB55 wrote: post #35

I'd also be careful to avoid vanity metrics. I think your time is better spent building a dashboard for actionable metrics. A map of all of your api calls might look cool but what are you going to do with that? I'm more interested in average customer life-time value, churn, customer acquisition cost, retention etc... I've been looking into using geckoboard for this as it seems like it would make setup go much faster.

If you suddenly see a huge cluster of API calls in a single geographic area, that might point to an issue, such as a problem connecting to the local CDN. The stuff you're talking about is actionable from a business standpoint, but the stuff in the article is meant to be actionable from a performance and problem resolution standpoint.

Re: Your Startup Needs a Dashboard

#43

Post by sonofabell »

sophacles wrote: post #28

I worked at a place doing network appliance stuff. We managed and developed the machines, and product to end users. A simple dashboard increased our effectiveness by an order of magnitude. Some simple graphs and deep knowledge of the code really really helped. Some data from other departments combined with this was amazing. A simple color coded call queue count told us there was a problem before the front-line tech s…

I completely agree with your point 'the human mind is amazing at pattern recognition'. From personal experience, I can say I am a 'visual' person. (So much so that my startup is entirely based on this premise, because I think our eyes are amazing analytics tools.) But to my point: is that the case for everybody? Is everyone 'visual', or do some folks think better 'visually' than others?

Re: Your Startup Needs a Dashboard

#44

Post by pcopley »

lifeisstillgood wrote: post #40
pcopley wrote: post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As someone who has never used Graphite OR statsd, can you explain why you wouldn't want to do this?

Graphite/carbon/whisper is a rrd like tool - you give it a number of ticks labelled with a certain metric (facebook.photo.upload) and it counts the incoming ones over a fixed period, averages them, stores the average and goes on and on. Then it draws you a graph over those periods this is great for "what is normal" and "something has changed over past 5 mins, 5 days, 5 weeks" some things you want on your dashboard ar…

Excellent explanation, thank you.

Re: Your Startup Needs a Dashboard

#45

Post by roc »

MicahWedemeyer wrote: post #34
drcube wrote: post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'd argue that having a well illustrated overview of your whole company helps you prioritize this list. So put business and technological metrics on that dashboard. And then you can decide whether you should be focusing most on customer support, A/B testing, or that network bottleneck.

I won't disagree, but my main point is that everything has a cost. These blog posts often present what your business "needs" to do in a context-free manner. If you are sitting on your thumbs looking for something to do, then definitely add a dashboard. If you're like me and have a backlog a mile long, maybe a dashboard isn't the best way to spend your time.

> "maybe a dashboard isn't the best way to spend your time."

The point of the dashboard is that when you have one, you have actual accessible data from which you can plausibly determine what is the best use of your time.

e.g. If you can see that conversions are already coming in faster than the database is scaling then you know that you need to solve the scaling problem before you worry about A/B testing. Or vice-versa. You don't need to guess (as much).

Re: Your Startup Needs a Dashboard

#46

Post by j_s »

chucklarge wrote: post #27

I suggests everyone read these whitepapers on dashboard design. http://www.perceptualedge.com/articles/Whitepapers/Dashboard... http://www.perceptualedge.com/articles/Whitepapers/Common_Pi... The author also has written a great book on dashboard design. Operations dashboards are essential for any (tech?) company. Business dashboards are another beast all together.

Here is the book: http://www.amazon.com/Information-Dashboard-Design-Effective...

Do you have any additional suggested reading material? Thanks much.

Re: Your Startup Needs a Dashboard

#47

Post by j_s »

taligent wrote: post #10

For those that are considering this you can capture from all three areas of your 'stack' straight into Graphite: 1) Munin. There are hundreds of munin plugins around for monitoring every part of your infrastructure from CPU to MongoDB replication lag to number of Nginx 404s. Use Munin2Graphite bridge. 2) App. There are lots of statsd clients which allow you to measure all your business metrics. Signups. Retention rat…

Are there any similar technologies available for the Microsoft stack?

Re: Your Startup Needs a Dashboard

#48

Post by [deleted] »

viscanti wrote: post #21
andraz wrote: post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I can't agree more. First you need a product that works at least for some users, then when you are expanding the user base it's time for dashboards. Dashboard answers the question: Is my product right now working for my users? Eventually it can also show trends in terms of resource usage, strange peaks, etc. But the primary function of dashboard is answering the question: "are my users getting the service?" Additiona…

This seems pedantic. Of course the product needs to work for some users before you can measure anything about it. Otherwise your dashboard is filled with zeros, which should be obvious because the product doesn't work for anyone (and isn't a product). Once you've gotten to the MVP stage, you should be tracking the key metrics, and those should be easily viewable in some sort of dashboard. Tracking up-time (or if the…

[deleted]

Re: Your Startup Needs a Dashboard

#49

Post by billpatrianakos »

drcube wrote: post #33
MicahWedemeyer wrote: post #30

At any given time, there are a near infinite number of things your business "needs" to do: add a dashboard, A/B test your landing pages, test your database backups, fix your security holes, improve your customer service, add more metrics tracking, etc, etc. The list goes on and on. A big part of running your business involves looking at this list and picking the ones that make sense for your business, not what the bl…

I'd argue that having a well illustrated overview of your whole company helps you prioritize this list. So put business and technological metrics on that dashboard. And then you can decide whether you should be focusing most on customer support, A/B testing, or that network bottleneck.

I think it can be argued that a dashboard isnt as great as this post makes it sound. The implication is that there's one person or one team looking at the dash and making sure things are running smoothly. Instead you can break up that big dashboard into a series of smaller ones each being watched over by the specific team for which each dash applies to. If your company's teams all work well together then the suits can focus on business and everyone else works together to keep things working arguably more efficiently. It's like have decentralization of responsibility instead of a top down system where one person/group is charged with knowing what's going on everywhere at once.
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