What should determine the content and layout of an Instana dashboard?
Select an answer to reveal the explanation.
Short Explanation
Start from the operational questions the audience needs answered, then choose and group the metrics. If you start from the metrics, you get a wall of graphs nobody reads under pressure.
Full Explanation
The correct choice is the operational questions the audience needs answered, with metrics selected and grouped to answer them. Dashboards are tools for answering questions - is the service healthy, what changed, where is the bottleneck. Selecting and grouping metrics around those questions is what makes it usable at three in the morning.
The completeness approach, with every metric the platform collects for the service on a single page, is incorrect because an ungrouped page of every available metric forces the reader to do the interpretation work the dashboard was supposed to do.
The alerting requirement approach, since the dashboard is where the team will notice problems, is incorrect because a dashboard requires someone to be looking; alerting must push notifications to responders.
The individual preference approach, with each engineer keeping their own private view of shared incidents, is incorrect because private views for shared incidents mean responders cannot see the same picture during a response.
For the exam, design dashboards from the question backwards.