| Hear hear. At CoreOS I set up a number of dashboards specifically to socialize the normative behavior of our systems. Think of it as the difference between the person who just drives their car versus the person who knows what feels and sounds "normal". The latter can tell when they need an oil change because of different vibrations in the engine and how the car sounds pulling up to a stop light (because of the engine sounds being reflected back into the window by parked cars). Big surprise, it had the desired effect. I'm especially with you on the notion of disparate metrics. While correlation is not causation, it's still a useful diagnostic tool. Let's say someone in marketing walks a dashboard and and sees the following: 1) a new version has been pushed
2) customer tickets are up 20% over the number they're used to seeing Does that mean that the new version caused the tickets? No. Will that allow them to ask? Absolutely. Will that urge behavior to reach out to support and release management to see if there's an interesting story to share internally (or with the world)? Hopefully. You hit the nail on the head by calling out the absolutist / "I'm the authority on this matter" / "there is a single correct perspective" tone. Your lack of shock at the author selling something can be remedied. They have a dog in this fight: https://www.honeycomb.io/teammember/charity-majors/ |
If you have no feel for what normal looks like on you system then it'll take longer to notice problems and longer to fix them.