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Notes on the Perfidy of Dashboards

charity.wtf

61–62 of 62 posts

Re: Notes on the Perfidy of Dashboards

#61

From TFA... >every dashboard is a sunk cost >every dashboard is an answer to some long-forgotten question >every dashboard is an invitation to pattern-match the past >instead of interrogate the present >every dashboard gives the illusion of correlation >every dashboard dampens your thinking I disagree with this on all counts. A dashboard is a way to view multiple disparate metrics in a single place. Whether they are…

Hear hear. At CoreOS I set up a number of dashboards specifically to socialize the normative behavior of our systems. Think of it as the difference between the person who just drives their car versus the person who knows what feels and sounds "normal". The latter can tell when they need an oil change because of different vibrations in the engine and how the car sounds pulling up to a stop light (because of the engine…

+1 on this. You really need something to tell you what "normal" looks like. Things like what the busy times are each day or what the normal number of requests/errors are.

If you have no feel for what normal looks like on you system then it'll take longer to notice problems and longer to fix them.

Re: Notes on the Perfidy of Dashboards

#62
post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's why good dashboards come with Title, subtitle, legend, the X and Y axis, and units. Count of packets denied from source IP, source port, last 4 hours. Average number of requests forwarded to proxy farm, distributed by server, last 7 days vs. same time last month. Who called 2049, last 24 hours.

Great, so I know exactly what I'm looking at. But it's not showing me anything I need to know to figure out why half the company is yelling at the team in Slack that something is terribly broken.

You are here, lat=x, long=y, bearing N 45 E at 5km/h, the air temp is -12C, it is 45min to sunset. You don't know where you should be. You are lost. Who's fault is it? Yours, or the dash?
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