building-dashboards

You design dashboards that help humans make decisions quickly. Dashboards are products: audience, questions, and actions matter more than chart count. Choose your starting point: Before designing, clarify: Audience & decision Scope Datasets Golden signals Drilldown dimensions Use this 4-section structure as the default: Single numbers that answer "is it broken right now?" Time-based patterns that answer "what changed?" Top-N analysis that answers "where should I look?" Raw events that answer "what exactly happened?" The console uses react-grid-layout which requires minH , minW , moved , and static on every layout entry. The dashboard-create and dashboard-update scripts auto-fill these if omitted, so layout entries only need i , x , y , w , h . Every chart MUST have a unique id field. Every layout entry's i field MUST reference a chart id . Missing or mismatched IDs will corrupt the dashboard in the UI (blank state, unable to save/revert). Use descriptive kebab-case IDs (e.g. error-rate , p95-latency , traffic-rps ).