What are the key features and capabilities of a system monitoring dashboard?

A robust system monitoring dashboard should: 1.Have live data for immediate insights. 2.Allow users to tailor widgets for specific metrics. 3.Provide instant alerts for potential issues. 4.Enable analysis of trends and patterns over time. 5.Ensure secure access control to maintain data integrity. 6.Support various devices for accessibility and responsive design. 7.Connect with diverse data sources and third-party tools. 8.Handle increasing data volumes seamlessly. 9.Allow users to explore detailed information (ex. Drill-down/Drill-through options) By incorporating these features, a system monitoring dashboard becomes a powerful tool for proactive system management and optimization.

A system monitoring dashboard is a crucial tool for IT professionals and system administrators to keep track of the health, performance, and status of a computer system or network. Here are key features and capabilities that are typically found in an effective system monitoring dashboard: Real-Time Metrics: Provides real-time data on system performance metrics, including CPU usage, memory utilization, disk I/O, network traffic, and more. Enables instant visibility into the current state of the system. Customizable Dashboards: Allows users to customize the dashboard to display the specific metrics and information most relevant to their needs. Provides flexibility in arranging and organizing widgets or panels on the dashboard.

Monitoring dashboard gives you an eagle-eye view of the health not only of your system but also of your digital business. Revenue, conversions, registrations, traffic patterns, even usage -- all of these are application-specific metrics that should be collected and correlated to system metrics. Exposing metrics that show your KPIs will help identify the most critical changes in trends and is the best starting point to start investigation.

NewRelic, a commercial tool, which started as APM (Application Performance Monitoring) has expanded it's coverage to systems and browsers, offering full-stack telemetry support with distributed tracing. They offer auto-detection and configuration for majority of the modern system components and support most of modern application languages and frameworks.

Ability to detect trends at a glance is one of the key needs in setting up a monitoring dashboard. Looking at performance of you network side by side with your databases and business KPIs will help to understand the whole picture. Being able to corelate patterns from different parts of your system (and business) to detect starting point of investigation or root cause will significantly lower your team's MTTR (Mean Time To Remedy).

Take advantage of the different visualizations available through your observability platform. Often times averages over minute (which is the most common representation of telemetry data) can give incomplete or inaccurate results. Utilize heatmaps and histograms to gain a more granular insight into the performance of your system.