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Build a quality dashboard

A dashboard is the screen your shift actually looks at. Start from a template and change what does not fit.

  • Data flowing from at least one device
  • A question in mind — “how is Line 3 doing this shift?” beats “let’s make a dashboard”

Open Monitoring and select New Dashboard. Templates are offered up front.

The Monitoring page offering dashboard templates

Take a template if one is close. It is faster to delete two widgets than to build six, and the defaults reflect how these metrics are normally read.

For anything a template does not cover, go to Explore before you add a widget.

Explore is the scratchpad: write the query, run it, look at the answer, change it. Once a query earns its keep, Add to Dashboard turns it into a permanent widget.

Building widgets directly on the dashboard means editing in the place everyone is looking. Get it right in Explore, then publish.

Widget Use when
Time series The question is about change — defect rate, throughput, temperature
Bar chart You are comparing categories — defects by type, output by line
Table You need exact values, not a shape
Gauge It is one number against a target
Pie chart It is composition, with few enough slices to read

Most operational questions are “is this getting worse?”, which is a time series. Reach for a pie chart rarely.

Drag widgets to move them and drag their edges to resize.

Put what matters top-left. Somebody glancing at a wall screen between tasks reads one or two things, not nine — so decide what those are and give them the space.

Any widget offers Open in Explore, which reloads that widget’s query in the scratchpad. Use it when a dashboard raises a question instead of answering one — which is what a good one does.