A Declarative Specification for Authoring Metrics Dashboards

TL;DR

This paper introduces a high-level declarative specification and a graphical interface for efficiently creating metrics dashboards, reducing manual effort and enabling flexible, data-driven dashboard authoring.

Contribution

It proposes a novel declarative specification for dashboards and a graphical tool, Quick Dashboard, to streamline dashboard creation based on common structural patterns.

Findings

The specification supports various dashboard types.

Quick Dashboard simplifies the authoring process.

Dashboards can be created more quickly and flexibly.

Abstract

Despite their ubiquity, authoring dashboards for metrics reporting in modern data analysis tools remains a manual, time-consuming process. Rather than focusing on interesting combinations of their data, users have to spend time creating each chart in a dashboard one by one. This makes dashboard creation slow and tedious. We conducted a review of production metrics dashboards and found that many dashboards contain a common structure: breaking down one or more metrics by different dimensions. In response, we developed a high-level specification for describing dashboards as sections of metrics repeated across the same dimensions and a graphical interface, Quick Dashboard, for authoring dashboards based on this specification. We present several usage examples that demonstrate the flexibility of this specification to create various kinds of dashboards and support a data-first approach to dashboard authoring.