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 ensure system availability during peak seasons, your visualization should focus on logs that show when user requests are successful and fail.

• 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: To ensure system availability, you might ask, “When does our server experience issues processing user requests?”

• 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 logs visualization shows 500 server errors, then it’s likely your servers are unable to handle the unexpected traffic and you’ll want to proactively allocate resources to address the issue.

By answering these questions, you can create dashboards that empower your team to make informed, high impact decisions.