IT Troubleshooter | Harper Mann » Systems and Network Dashboards Need to Get with the 'Blink' Principle

May 10, 2006 | Comments: (0)

Systems and Network Dashboards Need to Get with the 'Blink' Principle

TAGS: Networking

In Malcolm Gladwell's most recent book -- "Blink: The Power of Thinking Without Thinking" -- he explains the power of the first moments of human perception, and how often more information is gleaned in those initial moments than in the subsequent thought and analysis that follows.

Coincidentally, I picked up "Blink" at the same time that I also happened to be reading "Information Dashboard Design -- The Effective Visual Communication of Data." This book -- authored by Stephen Few -- highlights a number of ways that dashboards fall short in their implicit goal of presenting a lot of information to the user in a way that's intuitive and digestible. For example, there may be inadequate context on the data ... or there may be excessive detail ... or there may be useless decoration on a display that's simply distracting. Few, is an admirer of Tufte, who developed many interesting graphics and web design principles that remain popular today.

I think there are principles in both books that are often lost on the folks that design systems and network monitoring / management dashboards. The main point of a dashboard shouldn't be to show CPU utilization on disk #12 in the server room, or other minutia on low-level hardware information. The business guys don't care. What they care about is -- is this network up or down? Is this application performing fast or slow?

And particularly with the emergence of commodity hardware sprawl, where we have 8,000 Linux boxes in a datacenter -- how much do you care about one going down, when you can easily just plug in a new one and replace it?

So the point is that while the low level information is important to the IT guys in the trenches, IT dashboards have a long way to go in terms of putting the information up-front, and providing the type of first-glance indicators that make these tools useful to the business audience. With most dashboards, the tools themselves continue to relegate us to chasing rabbits down a hole, thinking about bits and bytes, while the critical information is lost in quantity. Dashboards should be about the bigger picture surfaced with enough context to guide what needs to be done now.

Here are a few additional URLs to dashboard design principles / discussions from Stephen Few that I stumbled upon that you might find useful for further reading, if the topic interests you:

http://www.perceptualedge.com/about.htm
http://www.b-eye-network.com/blogs/few/
http://www.perceptualedge.com/examples.htm#

Posted by Harper Mann on May 10, 2006 04:58 PM

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