[taligent]

I have to respectively disagree.

Metrics are also about the state of your business. What is your growth rate ? What is your churn ? Are people only clicking on certain features ? Where should you improve performance ? These sort of questions are essential for startups especially in the early stages where you need to be careful where to allocate precious resources.

Yes you can sort of gauge that with Google Analytics but only to a certain granularity. Graphite is incredibly flexible.

[ArbitraryLimits]

I think your parent post is saying that metrics are for control and not planning. Once you've identified what your business depends on, and have identified good metrics that (at best) are proxies for those things, a dashboard is a great idea. If on the other hand you don't actually understand your business model, your first goal is to start to understand it, and fixating on a particular set of metrics will only make that harder IMO.