Putting metrics and charts on custom dashboards has been an important part of IT and business operations from the earliest days of monitoring. That’s not to say nothing has changed in the past 30–40 years. To the contrary, the concept of creating and maintaining hundreds of dashboards is outdated and we know there are much better ways to implement a dashboarding strategy. The key is to create as few dashboards as needed, with as much automation built in for managing those dashboards. This approach is what IBM has been working on with our curated and automated dashboard system and now we supplement that strategy with custom dashboards.

Automated and curated dashboards

The IBM Instana™ platform has made it easy to create a set of predefined dashboards that require zero maintenance. These predefined dashboards are automatically created whenever a user defines an application perspective (AP). By definition, APs don’t require any maintenance. They’re based on regular expressions that automatically and continuously update the contents of an AP. Create the definition once and the IBM Instana platform will keep your curated AP dashboards updated forever.

What do these automated, curated dashboards offer?

• Summary dashboard with the “golden signals” and other important metrics and charts
• Dependency map showing all dependent services and how they’re connected
• Table of services and key indicators
• Table of all related log and error messages with counts
• Table of all related infrastructure showing cluster, container, process and host KPIs

To be clear, you get all of it by taking five minutes or less to create a pattern-matching definition—and you never need to do any maintenance thereafter. The IBM Instana platform automatically updates the dashboards when you add new components, remove components, release new code and so on.

Business and IT performance metrics on custom dashboards

Not everything can be as automated as the AP curated dashboards we previously discussed. There are times when you need something a little more traditional and a little more manual. That’s where the new IBM Instana custom dashboard builder is needed.

The IBM Instana platform collects a lot of data so there’s much that can potentially be added to a custom dashboard. A common scenario is to combine business metrics and IT metrics on the same screen so you can see if a negative impact to your IT systems is causing a negative impact to the business. Also important on any dashboard is the ability to compare a given metric with that same metric at some point in the past so you have context for understanding if the current metric state is good, bad or neutral. All these tasks are incredibly easy to accomplish with IBM Instana custom dashboards. The dashboard builder is a live workspace where you can add, organize and test your dashboards for their intended audience.

Add as many widgets as you want. Each widget has access to all the data stored within the IBM Instana platform so you can put basically anything you want on your dashboard.

• Want to know how many items were added to a shopping cart? Check.
• Want to know how much you sold versus discounts given? Check.
• Want to know how many errors were thrown during checkout? Check.

Since the IBM Instana platform can collect custom metrics from a variety of sources, and since it traces every request from the web browser to the backend, the combinations of data for your new dashboards are nearly limitless—and, more importantly, are always accurate.

Get started

If you want to see what the IBM Instana platform is capable of, take a few minutes to get a guided tour. Of course, you always have the opportunity to try it in your own environment at any time with our two-week free trial.