every dashboard is a sunk cost every dashboard is an answer to some long-forgotten question every dashboard is an invitation to pattern-match the past instead of interrogate the present every dashboard gives the illusion of correlation every dashboard dampens your thinking https://t.co/OIEowa1COa
It’s true: the dashboards we use today for doing operational diagnostic work are … let’s say suboptimal. Charity Majors is one of the founders of Honeycomb, one of the newer generation of observability tools. I’m not a Honeycomb user myself, so I can’t say much intelligently about the product. But my naive understanding is that the primary way an operator interacts with Honeycomb is by querying it. And it sounds like a very nifty tool for doing that, I’ve certainly felt the absence of being able do high-cardinality queries when trying to narrow down where a problem is, and I would love to have access to a tool like that.
But we humans didn’t evolve to query our environment, we evolved to navigate it, and we have a very sophisticated visual system to help us navigate a complex world. Honeycomb does leverage the visual system by generating visualizations, but you submit the query first, and then you get the visualization.