Everyone loves example dashboards! So we’ve decided to do a series to highlight a few of the coolest ones. If you’re easily bored skip to the bottom set of links to get your dopamine fix of screenshots. For those with a longer attention span hopefully this post helps explain some context.
Firstly, some background, for those who know nothing about Outlyer. You can think of our dashboards as a mix of Grafana and Dashing (if you come from the open source world). They contain analytics and business dashboard features all wrapped up in a UI that’s designed to promote adoption outside of operations. We work primarily with companies who are launching an online service, most of which are on public cloud infrastructure and who encourage a DevOps culture.
Our focus is on custom monitoring which I often compare to how Lego is promoted. We provide some guidance and templates to automatically monitor common services (like Lego box sets, or in our case ‘packs’) but our real focus is on helping people to create their own unique stuff. Outlyer makes it incredibly simple to get all of your custom metrics into a central place and then encourages your team mates to express their creativity in the form of point and click dashboards that can be shared around the office. We also do some complex stream processing stuff for alerting but that isn’t nearly as fun to blog about.
We often get asked to provide some inspiration for what to show on dashboards. Previously, we have written about using dashboards to change behaviour but didn’t provide many concrete examples. This series of blogs will hopefully provide some specifics that everyone can draw from.
So what happens when you provide a tool like Outlyer to teams outside Ops? We’ve been working extremely closely with a number of online services to find out. We sit every day in our public Slack chat room talking about exactly this type of stuff and sharing ideas, along with Plugins and Dashboard YAML files in our public Github repos. The results have been generally quite surprising.
The examples are grouped up by genre as shown by the post titles. Everything loosely fits under these so far but over time we may think up a better way to group them.