What’s the minimum viable dashboard for a service?

Six panels: traffic/success, latency tails, retries/timeouts, saturation, backpressure, dependencies. Each with thresholds, SLO overlays, and deploy annotations.

How do I set burn-rate thresholds?

Use the multi-window approach from SRE: pair a fast window (5m) and a slow window (1h). For a 99.9% SLO, common fast/slow burn thresholds are 14x and 6x. Tune to your traffic patterns and desired page budget.

Do I need distributed tracing to do this?

Tracing helps root cause faster, but start with metrics. OpenTelemetry metrics + Prometheus are enough for SLOs, burn, and leading indicators. Add tracing to connect deploy/flag context to hotspots.

Logs are for explaining, not for paging. Keep them for forensics and link queries from runbooks. Don’t put log volume charts on the primary dashboard unless they represent a leading indicator like error spike percentage.

We’re on Datadog/New Relic, not Prometheus/Grafana. Does this apply?

Yes. The concepts are vendor-agnostic. Implement SLOs, burn rate, tails, retries, saturation, and backpressure with whatever stack you use. Most tools support the same math and alert routing; tie them to your rollout system the same way.

Reliability-observability · Nov 6, 2025 · 9 minute read

The Dashboard Diet: Fewer Charts, Clearer Thresholds, Faster Saves

Make dashboards actionable by focusing on leading indicators and wiring telemetry into triage and rollout automation — so the screen tells you what to do next, not just what went wrong.

Back to all posts

The Dashboard Diet: Fewer Charts, Clearer Thresholds, Faster Saves

Key takeaways

Implementation checklist