Vanity Dashboards

We love big screens in the NOC (Network Operations Center) with spinning globes, green pie charts, and "Total Requests Served: 10,000,000".

What they hide

These dashboards act as Success Theater.

• "99.9% Uptime" (But the checkout button is broken for Safari users).
• "Average Latency: 200ms" (But the P99 latency is 10 seconds, meaning 1% of users are timing out).

The only metric that matters

Business/User Impact.

• "Orders per minute" (If this drops to zero, wake everyone up).
• "Login Success Rate".
• "Payment Gateway Rejections".

[!CAUTION] Stop building dashboards for your boss. Build dashboards for the person debugging the outage at 2 AM. They don't need a spinning globe; they need log aggregation.

Observability Maturity

1. Monitoring: "Something is broken."
2. Observability: "I know WHY it is broken."
3. Causality: "I know what changed to make it break."