402 — Dashboard Design & Alert Quality

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Learn dashboard design principles using Google's Golden Signals and Brendan Gregg's USE method layouts, choose the right visualizations, measure alert quality, and provision dashboards as code.

Learning Objectives

Design effective monitoring dashboards

Choose appropriate visualization types

Measure and improve alert quality

Provision dashboards as code

Step 1

Dashboard design principles

Learn the foundational principles for building dashboards that are actually useful during incidents, not just pretty to look at during calm periods.

Commands to Run

cat <<'EOF'
=== DASHBOARD DESIGN PRINCIPLES ===

1. AUDIENCE: Who is this dashboard for?
   - Executive: high-level SLO status, trends
   - On-call engineer: actionable signals, drill-down
   - Developer: service-specific detail

2. HIERARCHY: Overview first, then detail
   - Row 1: SLO status (are we healthy?)
   - Row 2: Golden signals (what is happening?)
   - Row 3: Infrastructure (why is it happening?)

3. CONTEXT: Every panel needs context
   - Thresholds and SLO lines on graphs
   - Deployment annotations
   - Time comparisons (today vs last week)
EOF

What This Does

The number one mistake in dashboard design is putting too much information on a single screen. A good dashboard tells a story: first the headline (are we healthy?), then the supporting evidence (what is happening?), then the root cause indicators (why?). Each row should naturally lead the viewer to the next level of detail.

Expected Outcome

You see three core dashboard design principles: audience, hierarchy, and context.

Pro Tips

1
If you need to scroll to find the most important panel, your dashboard layout needs work
2
Use consistent color coding across all dashboards — green always means healthy, red always means problem

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