Dashboard Builder
Use this when the task is to build a dashboard people can operate from.
The goal is not "show every metric." The goal is to answer:
- is it healthy?
- where is the bottleneck?
- what changed?
- what action should someone take?
When to Use
- "Build a Kafka monitoring dashboard"
- "Create a Grafana dashboard for Elasticsearch"
- "Make a SigNoz dashboard for this service"
- "Turn this metrics list into a real operational dashboard"
Guardrails
- do not start from visual layout; start from operator questions
- do not include every available metric just because it exists
- do not mix health, throughput, and resource panels without structure
- do not ship panels without titles, units, and sane thresholds
Workflow
1. Define the operating questions
Organize around:
- health / availability
- latency / performance
- throughput / volume
- saturation / resources
- service-specific risk
2. Study the target platform schema
Inspect existing dashboards first:
- JSON structure
- query language
- variables
- threshold styling
- section layout
3. Build the minimum useful board
Recommended structure:
- overview
- performance
- resources
- service-specific section
4. Cut vanity panels
Every panel should answer a real question. If it does not, remove it.
Example Panel Sets
Elasticsearch
- cluster health
- shard allocation
- search latency
- indexing rate
- JVM heap / GC
Kafka
- broker count
- under-replicated partitions
- messages in / out
- consumer lag
- disk and network pressure
API gateway / ingress
- request rate
- p50 / p95 / p99 latency
- error rate
- upstream health
- active connections
Quality Checklist
- [ ] valid dashboard JSON
- [ ] clear section grouping
- [ ] titles and units are present
- [ ] thresholds/status colors are meaningful
- [ ] variables exist for common filters
- [ ] default time range and refresh are sensible
- [ ] no vanity panels with no operator value
Related Skills
research-opsbackend-patternsterminal-ops
