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We did this: http://blog.riothq.com/current-status We don't really cover any serious metrics, as we're mostly client work - but we did have a big screen that we wanted to use. It's become one of the coolest things in our office.
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.
Sprinkle the stat-recording somewhere common to all the calls (metaprogrammy-inheritance-whatever) and it's not even like it's a ton of work.
If anyone is interested, I'm building a dashboard app. It's currently in beta and was built in socketstream. https://dashku.com
We have plenty of tasks we could constructively spend our time on rather watschen der blinkenlichten.
If no one's going to watch your dashboard, why build it? If occasional glances at a dashboard is your monitoring strategy, why monitor at all?
Our monitoring system has to not only interrupt and alert us, it also has to be capable of some interventions on our behalf occasionally.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
That's a rather simplistic view and a slippery slope. Spending time on a pretty dashboard is one of the easiest ways to get drawn into vanity metrics and fapalytics. Proper monitoring is important, but that usually means completely different things for different departments. The CEO doesn't need to see database performance charts because he can't make sense of them anyway. Likewise the admin doesn't need to see conve…
What about a small organization or a one-man e-commerce company where database performance affects conversions, and you're the one-and-only tech-guy?
Small shops have limited tech resources. Database scaling and implementing A/B testing suites can and have competed for those resources.
many moons ago * 20+ i had a summer jobb in a industrial consumer analog photo lab, in the entrence to the coffe machine / resting area there where hand-plotted charts updated daily on velocity of orders / our fulfillment with comparison to expected orders and also historical high and lows . this made the workforce (40+) transparently se what shape we all where in with regards to business ...
It doesn't even matter what sort of logging/stats drawing software they use, it could just as well be a tiled window manager with some Google Analytics views on auto-refresh and a colour-coded log tail :)
Not saying you can't do much better than that by picking smart visualisations, but the biggest win is having a few dedicated screens mounted on the wall continuously displaying info, for everyone in the office to glance at.
Not to mention is looks damn cool and impressive :)