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Show HN: Castor, a live dashboard for your projects

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Re: Show HN: Castor, a live dashboard for your projects

#61

Post by sh87 »

weego wrote: post #16

One of the things that really hit home at my last job and that I see missing from a lot of these dashboards is comparative context. So I walk in in the morning and we have a dashboard for vists and signups / payments and it shows lots of visits and no payments. Is that normal? Is that expected or concerning? Without showing what it was yesterday at the same time or on the same day last week, or weekly/monthly avg how…

I've never understood the lure of dashboards.

Ok First, there are those, who care enough about the data, and for them dashboards are just not enough. Not enough data, not exactly what you are looking for and there's the element of ambiguity behind the large red bar on the chart.

Second, there are those who don't care enough and are honest enough to admit it, they would rather talk to someone who understood the data to get a sense of what's going on every once in a while.

Third, are those in the gray area in between these 2. They don't / can't care enough about the data but they also won't/can't admit/accept it. Dashboards, to them give an illusion of control and being in the know. And from my experience there are more of this type than the other two. So clearly Dashboards are a 'thing'!

I monitor my stuff based on scripts that I own and write myself Excel, Python and shell scripts. What I need is a reliable notification mechanism that's easy peasy to setup and move around. I could imagine a dashboard of this historical data that I have hand-picked but I don't think I will ever get there.

So, yeah I'll build this dashboard and keep people happy while I keep tabs based on what I can trust.

Re: Show HN: Castor, a live dashboard for your projects

#62

Post by bastijn »

morisy wrote: post #58
reacharavindh wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Apparently dashing is not being maintained anymore. Check its homepage. http://dashing.io

Yeah, we use Dashing, and very stable/nice/easy to extend. Sad that it's no longer maintained, but pretty good nonetheless.

You now have smashing [0].

"Smashing, the spiritual successor to Dashing, is a Sinatra based framework that lets you build excellent dashboards. It looks especially great on TVs."

0. https://github.com/Smashing/smashing

Re: Show HN: Castor, a live dashboard for your projects

#63

Post by jaxn »

weego wrote: post #16

One of the things that really hit home at my last job and that I see missing from a lot of these dashboards is comparative context. So I walk in in the morning and we have a dashboard for vists and signups / payments and it shows lots of visits and no payments. Is that normal? Is that expected or concerning? Without showing what it was yesterday at the same time or on the same day last week, or weekly/monthly avg how…

This is spot on. A KPI is not a number, but rather a number, a direction, and a target.

Also, gauges are almost always a terrible visual indicator. Even car dashboards are starting to understand this. Fuel gauges are good, speedometers are not.

Re: Show HN: Castor, a live dashboard for your projects

#64

Post by ams6110 »

jaxn wrote: post #63
weego wrote: post #16

One of the things that really hit home at my last job and that I see missing from a lot of these dashboards is comparative context. So I walk in in the morning and we have a dashboard for vists and signups / payments and it shows lots of visits and no payments. Is that normal? Is that expected or concerning? Without showing what it was yesterday at the same time or on the same day last week, or weekly/monthly avg how…

This is spot on. A KPI is not a number, but rather a number, a direction, and a target. Also, gauges are almost always a terrible visual indicator. Even car dashboards are starting to understand this. Fuel gauges are good, speedometers are not.

Why are speedometers not good? Speed is analog, seems appropriate to display it in analog. And you can tell at a glance if speed is increasing or decreasing by the direction the dial/indicator is moving.

Re: Show HN: Castor, a live dashboard for your projects

#65

Post by dagw »

ams6110 wrote: post #64
jaxn wrote: post #63

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is spot on. A KPI is not a number, but rather a number, a direction, and a target. Also, gauges are almost always a terrible visual indicator. Even car dashboards are starting to understand this. Fuel gauges are good, speedometers are not.

Why are speedometers not good? Speed is analog, seems appropriate to display it in analog. And you can tell at a glance if speed is increasing or decreasing by the direction the dial/indicator is moving.

For what it's worth my current car has both an analog and digital speedometer, and I never look at the analog speedometer anymore. The digital is just so much quicker and easier to read.

Re: Show HN: Castor, a live dashboard for your projects

#66

Post by dagw »

tw04 wrote: post #56
curun1r wrote: post #49

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's hard to include that information in a meaningful way on a dashboard. It's much easier to alert on that when a metric deviates by a certain percentage. We used a service called StatHat that did this automatically, but it could easily be written on top of an in-house data source like Influx or Prometheus. Dashboards are about visualizing how your application works over time, not whether your application is failing…

>It's hard to include that information in a meaningful way on a dashboard. How is it hard to show a comparison of current state vs. average state? That's literally about as simple as it gets, and something I would expect as basic functionality out of any dashboard product I was using.

But I don't care just about current vs. average. I care about current vs. 10 minutes ago vs. this morning vs. this time yesterday vs. same day last week vs. average. Now this can be shown in a dashboard with sufficient cleverness, but I find that most/all dashboards lack this.

Re: Show HN: Castor, a live dashboard for your projects

#68

Post by blaget »

Thanks everyone for your encouraging feedback! We've processed (most of) the bugs + typos, and realized a quick video to showcase Castor (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KLqvLqeNI9M).

We're also working on public dashboards (ie. share your dashboard with anyone/any device without the need to login) and that feature should be shipped in the next few hours.

Thanks again!

Re: Show HN: Castor, a live dashboard for your projects

#69

Post by swalsh »

sh87 wrote: post #61
weego wrote: post #16

One of the things that really hit home at my last job and that I see missing from a lot of these dashboards is comparative context. So I walk in in the morning and we have a dashboard for vists and signups / payments and it shows lots of visits and no payments. Is that normal? Is that expected or concerning? Without showing what it was yesterday at the same time or on the same day last week, or weekly/monthly avg how…

I've never understood the lure of dashboards. Ok First, there are those, who care enough about the data, and for them dashboards are just not enough. Not enough data, not exactly what you are looking for and there's the element of ambiguity behind the large red bar on the chart. Second, there are those who don't care enough and are honest enough to admit it, they would rather talk to someone who understood the data t…

Dashboards aren't things you pull up once in a while. They work best when they are things that you can just glance at, and instantly know some important metric you care about.

In our office we have giant screens all around (because screens are dirt cheap now) each team puts the metrics they care about on them. It's really not unusual for us to look at it, and be like "whoa, that metric is kind of spiking, let's take a look".

If you're in phase 1 of development, or even the first half of phase 2... you don't need one. If you're in phase 3 (maintence) you need one.

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