To elaborate on this, dashboards are where you go when you get an alert, to answer questions like:
- how widespread is it?
- who's impacted?
- is the alert the root cause, or just a symptom?
Dashboards should tell a story, not just be a bunch of graphs squeezed onto a page. There should be links to drill-down to more detailed dashboards, logs, and traces, to make it as fast and easy as possible to find the fire when you smell smoke, even for someone who's on their first week.
Most dashboards, unfortunately, are useless. But then those have a place too: hanging on a wall somewhere, to show people how not-useless we are.
Dashboards are great for at-a-glance metrics roll-up. Build small, single-page, targeted dash that answers questions your user asks, and they'll be used. I want to see the lay of the land and know I'm heading into the weeds, instead of being kicked in the shin by a monitoring alert when I'm already in the weeds.