What Goes on the Dashboard
A business observability dashboard is not a replacement for your technical dashboards — it's a companion that lives at the top of your incident response workflow and on the screens in your engineering war room. It should be readable by a non-engineer in under 10 seconds.
Essential panels for an e-commerce business observability dashboard:
┌─────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────┐
│ BUSINESS HEALTH — Production [Last 1 hour] │
├──────────────────┬──────────────────┬───────────────────────────┤
│ Orders/min │ Revenue/min │ Revenue at Risk/min │
│ ████ 847 │ ████ $42,350 │ ████ $0 │
│ ▲ +2% vs 7d avg │ ▲ +1% vs 7d avg│ ✓ Within normal range │
├──────────────────┼──────────────────┼───────────────────────────┤
│ Checkout Conv. │ New Signups/min │ Payment Failures/min │
│ ████ 3.2% │ ████ 23 │ ████ 0.4 │
│ ▼ -0.1% vs 7d │ ▲ +5% vs 7d │ ▲ +0.1 vs 7d avg │
├──────────────────┴──────────────────┴───────────────────────────┤
│ Orders/min — 7-day comparison with anomaly bands │
│ [Time series graph with shaded expected range] │
└─────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────┘
Linking Business and Technical Dashboards
Every business metric panel should link to the corresponding technical investigation dashboard. When an on-call engineer sees "Payment Failures/min" spike, one click should take them to the payment service dashboard showing error rates, latency percentiles, and dependency health.
This drill-down pattern — from business symptom to technical cause — is the core workflow of business observability. It answers "what is broken for the user?" before answering "why is it broken technically?"