Your Startup Needs a Dashboard
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Your Startup Needs a Dashboard
1–10 of 67 posts
Re: Your Startup Needs a Dashboard
#2Something like this would have to be everywhere. I know I always wait a few days, before sending feedback that something doesn't work for me and sometimes I just stop using features like that. The chance to fix something before users would even start to complain is priceless.
Like any doctor would say, the sooner you find out something is wrong, the better. And if nothing goes wrong, you have a huge cool display of how awesome your company is doing.
Re: Your Startup Needs a Dashboard
#3I have to say, I'm in two minds about this.
On one side- yes it's supercool to have a dashboard with maps and metrics and everything like that. And I can see it could be really useful too when something's going wrong.
On the other hand, I'd be wary of building anything like this until I had a good number of customers, paying me money for a service. Is the product so complete (I would ask myself) and my users so happy, that we have no more important task than building a dashboard to look at in the office. Don't some simple email alerts cover most of the important bases (server down, site down etc) for now.
Your startup needs customers (or failing that, users). Your users don't care if you've got a dashboard, they care that your product does what it says.
Re: Your Startup Needs a Dashboard
#4I agree with this. Our version is a plain ol' chalkboard, but it covers the entire wall. We mainly use it for the current state of the company - projects, action steps, projections, etc. Incredibly useful and has a UI everyone understands.
Re: Your Startup Needs a Dashboard
#5I think that's a very good idea for a new startup. Indeed, i have a client who asked me to build something like this for him. Hi got tons of stuff running on his business (mining company). Data are at everywhere (excel sheets, server, databases) and he want's me to integrate everything and extract a lot of information. No idea how to do such a thing.
Re: Your Startup Needs a Dashboard
#6My new strategy is to instrument the hell out of things -- but only to look at data when enough of it has accumulated to be meaningful.
I think you can make a mistake of measuring and trying to understand data in increments that are so small as to be a waste of time. It can become just another way to not be minding your knitting. Server down? You need to know right now. Knowing that somebody considering buying your product is using a iPhone in New Zealand? Not so much. Computers are great at catching and storing all sorts of stuff. Unless it's critical, best to play with the bells and whistles in controlled deep dives, not as part of a Tony Stark video-game-master-of-the-universe thing. I love bringing up my real-time site metrics and watching all sorts of folks that I am helping. I also like to watch my stock portfolio move throughout the day. But I've found that there's a lot of naval-gazing going on there and not much of anything useful.
Don't look at measurements that generate no subsequent management activity.
Re: Your Startup Needs a Dashboard
#7Dashboards provide value on multiple levels. They radiate information out into your team so everyone is working off of the same shared understanding about the state of the business. They make it easier to detect aberrations. They enable your experts to curate a set of top-level metrics on a per-service basis to look at first when fire-fighting. Every service in your architecture should have it's own dashboard.
If you're interested in dashboards, our startup recently launched a service that makes it simple to hook in your metrics through OSS tools like StatsD and build real-time dashboards with a few clicks: https://metrics.librato.com You just provide the data, we do all the rest. Would love any feedback you might have!
Re: Your Startup Needs a Dashboard
#8I have to say, I'm in two minds about this. On one side- yes it's supercool to have a dashboard with maps and metrics and everything like that. And I can see it could be really useful too when something's going wrong. On the other hand, I'd be wary of building anything like this until I had a good number of customers, paying me money for a service. Is the product so complete (I would ask myself) and my users so happy…
Cant agree more. I almost always have email triggers built into the system for ever critical error or failure of the system. When we are being lean on the core product itself building less features... build it when you need it approach ... having a dashboard is kind of luxury.
Re: Your Startup Needs a Dashboard
#9I have to say, I'm in two minds about this. On one side- yes it's supercool to have a dashboard with maps and metrics and everything like that. And I can see it could be really useful too when something's going wrong. On the other hand, I'd be wary of building anything like this until I had a good number of customers, paying me money for a service. Is the product so complete (I would ask myself) and my users so happy…
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?"
Additional note: dashboard works wonders for getting us - engineers - understand that there are real users out there right now and thus making us want to build even better product.
Re: Your Startup Needs a Dashboard
#10For 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 rate. Revenue rates etc.
3) Front End. With the NginxStatsd module you can push stats directly into statds from your Javascript methods. Use it to do end to end timing, capture what the user is doing etc without putting any load on your app.
Sure it's a bit of work but done well it can save you a lot of money over products like MixPanel or NewRelic.