|
Honestly, the complaint here seems to be less about dashboards and more about the data behind them. Static dashboards sound like timeseries backends, where the data is pre-aggregated (graphite / statsd, prometheus). You can't really drill down into the metrics, or can only drill down into preplanned dimensions. Grafana is a commonly used dashboarding frontend here. Dynamic dashboards, in contrast, are dynamically aggregating data. More akin to structured logging, or maybe splunk / ELK. You have granular data, and write queries to extract, filter, and aggregate on demand. Tableau, PowerBI, Apache Superset all compete in this space. But by focusing on the dashboard angle, the reader doesn't think to hardly about why they're different, and also why you might prefer one over the other. TSDB like Prometheus are very fast, and if you focus on collecting aggregate data, allow you to collect a lot more metrics, or sample much faster. You're probably not logging in the TSDB any labels associated with UserAgent strings, or screen size your mobile app got, etc. By paying the price in dimensionality, you get much faster queries at lower cost. I'll let you guess which type of backend Charity's startup represents. Both have a place. I've been able to build canary dashboards that work quite well using both backends, as a proof of concept that something like Kayenta is feasible for my team. In fact, high dimensionality works against you in release engineering. The more dimensions you can compare across, the higher chance for a false positive, and the more investigations engineers have to do to rule them out. Worse, there are often confounding variables you need to go hunting for, and the dashboard won't find them for you. And execs absolutely don't want to have to care about the complex causality chain you need to model. They want 'a single number' to improve on over time. They don't want a dashboard to dive in and analyze on ten dimensions. They want to see their chosen KPIs going to the right and up. Fundamentally, the dashboard is less important than your audience. |