Journal
Dashboards that flatter and mislead
From the Dashboard honesty module · ~8 min
Some panels exist to soothe. Green gauges, truncated Y-axes, success rates that exclude timeouts — they photograph well in status meetings and age poorly in incidents. We teach detection as a habit.
Three questions we ask first
- What traffic is missing from this chart by design?
- Would a customer recognize the unit on this axis?
- If this panel went red, who would know what to do in the next ten minutes?
Flattery patterns
Watch for averages paired with celebratory color, rolling windows that swallow regressions, and “error rate” definitions that ignore client aborts. None of these are evil; they are incomplete. Application analytics earns trust when incompleteness is labeled.
A kinder replacement
Swap one vanity panel for a captioned histogram and a single customer SLI. Your cloud performance monitoring suite will look less festive and more useful. That trade is the whole curriculum in miniature.