dashboard-builder

SKILL.md

Dashboard Builder

Use this when the task is to build a dashboard people can operate from.

The goal is not "show every metric." The goal is to answer:

is it healthy?

where is the bottleneck?

what changed?

what action should someone take?

When to Use

"Build a Kafka monitoring dashboard"

"Create a Grafana dashboard for Elasticsearch"

"Make a SigNoz dashboard for this service"

"Turn this metrics list into a real operational dashboard"

Guardrails

do not start from visual layout; start from operator questions

do not include every available metric just because it exists

do not mix health, throughput, and resource panels without structure

do not ship panels without titles, units, and sane thresholds

Workflow

1. Define the operating questions

Organize around:

health / availability

latency / performance

throughput / volume

saturation / resources

service-specific risk

2. Study the target platform schema

Inspect existing dashboards first:

JSON structure

query language

variables

threshold styling

section layout

3. Build the minimum useful board

Recommended structure:

overview

performance

resources

service-specific section

4. Cut vanity panels

Every panel should answer a real question. If it does not, remove it.

Example Panel Sets

Elasticsearch

cluster health

shard allocation

search latency

indexing rate

JVM heap / GC

Kafka

broker count

under-replicated partitions

messages in / out

consumer lag

disk and network pressure

API gateway / ingress

request rate

p50 / p95 / p99 latency

error rate

upstream health

active connections

Quality Checklist

 valid dashboard JSON

 clear section grouping

 titles and units are present

 thresholds/status colors are meaningful

 variables exist for common filters

 default time range and refresh are sensible

 no vanity panels with no operator value

Related Skills

research-ops

backend-patterns

terminal-ops