Show me the (meeting) money: How to monitor the real-time costs of a meeting in Grafana

This meeting could’ve been an email. 

It’s a phrase most of us have said (or at least thought) at some point in our careers. 

For me, that realization hit years ago while working for a government organization. I’d frequently sit through long, agendaless meetings that seemingly went nowhere. I wasn’t sure why I was there. And because I’m an engineer at heart, I started to wonder: what were these meetings actually costing the organization? Not just in abstract productivity hours, but in actual dollars and cents?

A few simple math formulas later, a few colleagues and I got to work on a Perl script to find out. Fast forward to today, and I lead the developer advocacy team here at Grafana Labs, where I recently reimagined that old Perl script as a Grafana dashboard.

In this post, we’ll walk through that dashboard — called the Meeting Cost Calculator — and how it helps you visualize the real-time costs of any business meeting, down to the cent. 

Full disclosure: this concept originated as a joke between coworkers. It’s meant to be a fun, lighthearted way to monitor the real-time costs of a meeting. It’s not meant to cast judgement on how anyone runs theirs. Mostly, I just hope it’s something you can share with your team to get a good laugh, and maybe learn a thing or two about Grafana along the way. 

That sync cost how much?! A closer look at how the dashboard works

For the most part, the Meeting Cost Calculator dashboard does exactly what its name suggests: it shows you, in real time, how much your meeting is costing you (under the watchful but tired eye of Peter Gibbons from Office Space). 

As common as meetings are, I doubt we’re the only ones who’ve built a way to calculate their costs. The difference here, of course, is that our dashboard uses Grafana to help you quickly and easily track those costs through eye-catching visualizations.

To start using the dashboard, you’ll need to first enter two simple inputs:

• The number of attendees in the meeting
• The average hourly cost per person 

As you can see in the screenshot above, these values — which are Grafana variables — can be filled out in the top bar of the dashboard. The hourly cost of the meeting is the number of attendees times the hourly rate, which we can work out all the way down to a cost per second with simple math.

If you don’t know the average hourly cost per person (which you likely won’t), I recommend starting around $200/hour. That might sound high, but it accounts for more than just salary, factoring in things like benefits and office equipment spend. Back in my consulting days, we had a “rule of 3,” which stated that the actual hourly cost of a person was roughly triple their salary/hourly rate. 

To start calculating real-time costs during a meeting, simply click the text that says Click here to reset the dashboard. Then, based on your inputs, the dashboard displays a count of how many seconds you’ve been in the meeting, the meeting cost per second, and the overall meeting cost so far.

Once you’ve got things displayed the way you want, you can copy and paste the full URL of the dashboard (which includes your variable values) and share with co-workers to live track the meeting you’re all in.

Behind the scenes, a microservice calculates the on-going cost, multiplying the per-person, per-second rate by the number of seconds elapsed, and keeping track of when the dashboard was reset (i.e., when the meeting started). Grafana fetches that data as JSON, and the dashboard refreshes every five seconds to keep things dynamic. 

This demonstrates a common technique used in many Grafana dashboards: visualizing data from any accessible microservice. Feel free to inspect the panels to get a better sense of how it works! 

Bonus panel: Business Buzzword Bingo

Let’s circle back. Low-hanging fruit. Lots of moving parts.  

Uh… BINGO?

We’re all guilty of using corporate clichés from time to time, so why not have some fun while we’re at it?

The Business Buzzword Bingo panel in the Meeting Cost Calculator dashboard lets you do just that, displaying an array of phrases that you can check off on your personal bingo card when you hear them in a meeting.

This component isn’t multiplayer (yet), but it’s a fun way to liven up a meeting — and maybe even hold ourselves accountable for saying things like “synergy” one too many times.

Start tracking meeting costs today 

The Meeting Cost Calculator dashboard is available today on Grafana Play, our public sandbox environment for testing and learning Grafana. We encourage you to inspect the panel definitions and see how it’s built. You can also copy the JSON definition and import it into your own Grafana instance to customize the dashboard however you’d like. Go ahead and adjust the average hourly cost, add your own memes, or even expand the Bingo board with your team’s favorite buzzwords (you know the ones).

If you do put your own spin on it, please share it with us in the Grafana Community Forum. We’d love to see what you come up with. And if you’ve created a different meeting cost calculator for your own teams, we’d love to hear about that, too.

Grafana Cloud is the easiest way to get started with metrics, logs, traces, dashboards, and more. We have a generous forever-free tier and plans for every use case. Sign up for free now!