How do you design a useful dashboard, and what is the difference from an alert? [Intermediate]
Answer
A useful dashboard is designed for a specific workflow: executive health, service operation, incident triage, or capacity planning. Alerts should wake people only for action; dashboards should provide context for humans who are already investigating.
Technical explanation
Start dashboards with user-impact signals, then dependency signals, then infrastructure causes.
Avoid dashboards with hundreds of unprioritized panels because they slow responders down.
A dashboard can show many conditions, but an alert must represent a clear action and owner.
Hands-on example
Dashboard layout: row 1: SLO compliance, burn rate, current incident status. Row 2: RED metrics by endpoint. Row 3: dependency latency and error rate. Row 4: CPU, memory, throttling, queue depth, DB pool. Add links to runbook, deployment history, Splunk logs, and trace search.
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