Getting to know dashboards

Dashboards represent collective insights on what is happening in the IT environment, the application’s performance, forecasts on usage and capacity, business metrics, customer experience, and many more. If developed with focus, they can easily help analyze, track, visualize, and display the underlying data. A typical dashboard will have as many panels as can fit on a standard screen. Each panel represents a fragment of information.

Let’s say, if a dashboard was built for MK Tea to monitor the shipping of packed tea, it would have the following panels:

• Packets ready versus required by type
• The health of quality key performance indicators (KPIs)
• Number of orders fulfilled
• Number of orders pending
• Number of orders in transit
• Order details

Dashboards can be static based on a predefined set of requirements or interactive which allows users to provide inputs and also analyze and explore the data to find answers...