[conductr]

> He, point blank, said: "sometimes I don't even know what I'm asking for"

Totally relate to that AND I'm often on the receiving end of those questions in a live setting (eg. board/exec meetings). Funny to stumble on this because just last week I told someone on our BI team, there is not any one "use case" I can lay out. The use case is this, assume I need to answer any random question that comes up. I need analytical enablement not a fancy dashboard in most instances. It's not to say dashboards don't have their place, but they're just the easily digestible summary of underlying data that's meant to highlight areas and raise those questions about "why..."

[SeriousM]

Oh thank you guys! I came to this post with the thinking of "dashboards are hard to build and when they exist it's hard to extend them". My boss is asking me from time to time to add yet another dashboard to grafana and all I can do is add another piece of specific inner working values because lack of traces - the "what" part. Up until now if was as if a car driver is asking for the average air volume intake yet in really he probably needs the "why" the air volume changes. The "probably" part is important here: if the driver is the test-driver then he needs the actual value, the what; is the driver the track performance guy he needs the why; and sometimes they need booth values because they feel more secure with more information. You guys just opened my eyes, thank you!

[proamdev123]

That’s a fantastic point. The unstated underlying request isn’t to see the same chart, the same way, every week/month/quarter. It’s actually: “Find any abnormalities in the data that could be threats or opportunities, and show me THAT — in a chart, table, email, or whatever medium make makes sense.”

[grvdrm]

Yes and to say it another way it’s often “tell me the story of something I don’t already know”