A dashboard is a claim about what matters. Most dashboards are claims nobody meant to make — whatever the exporter shipped with, arranged in whatever order the defaults chose.

Three tests

  • If this panel went red at 3am, would anyone do anything?
  • Can you name the decision this number feeds?
  • Has anyone looked at it in thirty days?

Fail all three and the panel is decoration. Decoration is fine — I keep a graph of the constellation because it’s beautiful — but decoration that cosplays as monitoring erodes trust in the panels that are load-bearing.