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Creating a monitoring dashboard

Written by Yi Ming Yung on 22nd March 2016

• monitoring dashboard
• telephony platform

 

During my internship at Spindle as a developer, I am going to do research and develop a monitoring dashboard for our telephony platform VoIPGRID. The monitoring dashboard is supposed to create more clarity about the status of the telephony platform and make it more insightful.

More clarity

It is going to be beneficial for VoIPGRID partners to get a clear picture of the status of our platform because they can keep their clients up to date (i.e. in case of outages). By having such a dashboard, partners will be able to tell with a glance at the monitoring dashboard if the problems are platform- or user-related.

Research plan

I have come up with a research plan document where I talk about how I am going to perform my research in more detail. The TL;DR version is that I am going to interview several partners of VoIPGRID and internal experts of Spindle. The main question behind the research is about the contents of the monitoring dashboard. What do the partners want to see in the dashboard in order to make the status clearer?

Semi-structured interviews

The biggest obstacles during interviews are that people usually do not know what it exactly is they want or want to see. That is why it is not feasible to ask a partner what he or she would like directly. They would simply reply with “I want to see if stuff works” or “I want to see everything”. This would be mostly useless information. It is hard for people to say what they want in detail. To get the answers that I can use, I will have to listen, repeat and narrow it down. This means that the interviews are going to be semi-structured in terms of questions.

Next steps

In the upcoming week, I will interview several partners by phone with the research question in mind. Our internal experts are located at the Spindle headquarters, this means that they will be approached personally.

Transcripts will be written from every interview. Using the transcripts, I will create an overview of what partners want to see in the monitoring dashboard. Using this overview (after being prioritized) I will create a proof of concept.