Building Dashboards

Philosophy

1. Decisions first. Every panel answers a question that leads to an action.
2. Overview → drilldown → evidence. Start broad, narrow on click/filter, end with raw logs.
3. Rates and percentiles over averages. Averages hide problems; p95/p99 expose them.
4. Simple beats dense. One question per panel. No chart junk.
5. Validate with data. Never guess fields—discover schema first.
6. Compute what's asked, or defer. If a panel can't be computed, replace it with a Note documenting the blocker. Never substitute a different quantity, even disclosed. See Compute or Defer.

Entry Points