Plan your visualization

Visualizations and dashboards are powerful tools designed to provide actionable insights into business problems. By translating raw data into meaningful visual representations, they help you identify trends, monitor performance, and make informed decisions. To maximize their value, it’s essential to align your visualizations with your business goals.

Key questions to consider

The key to building a useful dashboard lies in aligning your dashboards with your business objectives. While anyone can create a dashboard that visualizes data, the real challenge is ensuring that the data and visualization types are both relevant and effective in solving specific business problems.

As you start planning your dashboards and visualizations, consider the following questions to guide your approach:

• What business problem are you trying to solve?
  Clearly define the problem you want to address. This ensures that your visualizations are purpose-driven and focused on actionable insights.

  • Example: If your goal is to identify bottlenecks and failures, your visualization should enable you to select a specific trace and track it’s lifecycle.

• What specific questions should a visualization answer?
  Break down the business problem into smaller, measurable questions that your visualization can address. This helps you identify the exact data you need to display.

  • Example: For identifying bottlenecks and failures, you might ask “Which traces result in an error”?

• How will the insights help drive decisions or actions?
  Ensure that the visualizations provide actionable insights that can inform decisions or trigger specific actions. This step bridges the gap between data and outcomes.

  • Example: If your visualization shows traces that result in an error, you can explore the root cause to address the issue proactively.

By answering these questions, you can create dashboards that not only display data but also empower your team to make informed, high impact decisions.