I was reading an article by Dataloop.io about using dashboards to change behaviour. It was a good coincidence because I’d just stood up a Continuous Integration tool to let the team know when our puppet code fails tests, but had this niggling thought in the back of my mind “who, other than me, will look at this?”
The problem is we have so many dispirit systems that it’s easy to forget about one for a period of time, or the person who usually looks after it is on leave. So how do we compile all that information in one place?
Mentioned in that article (which I recommend reading btw) was something called Dashing, a Ruby framework for building dashboards. As someone who’s only done web development under duress, I dived into it and was surprised at what I managed to achieve in two days.
I was able to churn out integration with ServiceNow, Opsview and EMC Networker to present the three most valuable pieces of information to our team on a day to day basis. And, most importantly, I barely had to get my hands dirty with the web dev side! Most of my time was spent creating dashing jobs to collect the data.