A dashboard of fourteen panels, replaced by six, chosen by reading a quarter of incident messages.
the questions actually asked during incidents:
"is it everyone or one customer?" 6 times
"when did it start?" 6
"did we deploy anything?" 5
"is the database or the app?" 4
"is the queue moving?" 3
"is the supplier up?" 3
six panels, in that order, on one screen.
the fourteen panels it replaced answered none of these
directly. two of them answered the last one indirectly.A dashboard built from available metrics answers what is measurable and a dashboard built from questions answers what is asked, and those overlap less than expected. Deploy markers on the time axis were the single highest-value addition and are not a metric at all.