Nitty gritties of Dashboard Design..

A Key Performance Indicator (KPI) on a Dashboard is typically a metric which monitors a certain aspect of you System Landscape. In its basic state, a KPI shows 3 kinds of information:

The metric it is monitoring

1. The value of the metric at that given time
2. The status of the metric (in comparison to the thresholds set)

Apart from this, there are other kinds of information required to make a KPI more effective:

• The Threshold values
• The age of the KPI value (i.e, how old is the data)

Primarily there are two kinds of KPIs on a Dashboard:

1. KPIs which show Availability information
2. KPIs which show Performance information

Availability KPIs

Availability KPIs typically show whether a system/service/software component is up, down or in warning state.

Since they don’t have any value attached to them, they are the simplest KPIs to represent.

They are most commonly represented with Red and Green Traffic lights; although my opinion is to just show Red lights when appropriate; since that is what the Admin is interested in anyways…and also it avoids unnecessary clutter on the UI

Performance KPIs

A Performance KPI can show either a percentage value, or an exact value. Sometimes (but not always) it is a good idea to represent the percentage values using Progress Indicators. The idea is to draw attention only to the most crucial KPIs, so use special controls like progress indicators or pie charts only for certain key KPIs and not all of them to avoid visual noise and distraction.

But the problem with progress indicators existing today is that they are difficult to read and do not capture Threshold information at all. I have redesigned the Progress Indicators and adapted the Pie chart so that it can be used conveniently in a Dashboard context.