dashboard-builder
affaan-m/ecc
Build operational dashboards that answer real questions, not vanity boards.
What is dashboard-builder?
Creates monitoring dashboards for Grafana, SigNoz, and similar platforms focused on answering operator questions: is it healthy, where's the bottleneck, what changed, what action to take. Use when turning metrics into a working dashboard rather than displaying every available metric.
- Organizes dashboards around operator questions: health, latency, throughput, saturation, and service-specific risks
- Structures dashboards with overview, performance, resources, and service-specific sections
- Ensures panels have clear titles, units, and meaningful thresholds
- Removes vanity panels that don't answer real operational questions
- Provides example panel sets for common services like Elasticsearch, Kafka, and API gateways
How to install dashboard-builder
npx skills add null --skill dashboard-builderHow to use dashboard-builder
- 1.Define the operating questions your dashboard must answer (health, latency, throughput, saturation, service-specific risks)
- 2.Study the target platform's schema by inspecting existing dashboards for JSON structure, query language, and styling
- 3.Build the minimum useful board with overview, performance, resources, and service-specific sections
- 4.Remove any panels that don't answer a real operational question
- 5.Verify all panels have titles, units, meaningful thresholds, and sensible defaults
Use cases
- Build a Kafka monitoring dashboard with broker health, consumer lag, and replication status
- Create a Grafana dashboard for Elasticsearch cluster health, shard allocation, and search latency
- Make a SigNoz dashboard for an API service with request rate, latency percentiles, and error tracking
- Turn a metrics list into an operational dashboard with clear sections and actionable thresholds
- Design a service-specific dashboard that guides operators on what to check and what actions to take
- DevOps engineers and SREs building monitoring systems
- Platform operators managing Kafka, Elasticsearch, or other distributed systems
- Backend engineers creating dashboards for their services
- Operations teams needing dashboards that guide troubleshooting and decision-making
dashboard-builder FAQ
No. Every panel should answer a real operator question. If a metric doesn't help answer 'is it healthy?', 'where's the bottleneck?', 'what changed?', or 'what action to take?', remove it.
Organize into four sections: overview (health status), performance (latency/throughput), resources (saturation/capacity), and service-specific (domain-relevant metrics).
Start by defining the operating questions specific to your service, then select only the metrics that directly answer those questions.
Ensure valid JSON, clear section grouping, titles and units on all panels, meaningful thresholds and status colors, useful variables for filtering, and sensible default time ranges.
Full instructions (SKILL.md)
Source of truth, from affaan-m/ecc.
name: dashboard-builder description: Build monitoring dashboards that answer real operator questions for Grafana, SigNoz, and similar platforms. Use when turning metrics into a working dashboard instead of a vanity board. metadata: origin: ECC direct-port adaptation version: "1.0.0"
Dashboard Builder
Use this when the task is to build a dashboard people can operate from.
The goal is not "show every metric." The goal is to answer:
- is it healthy?
- where is the bottleneck?
- what changed?
- what action should someone take?
When to Use
- "Build a Kafka monitoring dashboard"
- "Create a Grafana dashboard for Elasticsearch"
- "Make a SigNoz dashboard for this service"
- "Turn this metrics list into a real operational dashboard"
Guardrails
- do not start from visual layout; start from operator questions
- do not include every available metric just because it exists
- do not mix health, throughput, and resource panels without structure
- do not ship panels without titles, units, and sane thresholds
Workflow
1. Define the operating questions
Organize around:
- health / availability
- latency / performance
- throughput / volume
- saturation / resources
- service-specific risk
2. Study the target platform schema
Inspect existing dashboards first:
- JSON structure
- query language
- variables
- threshold styling
- section layout
3. Build the minimum useful board
Recommended structure:
- overview
- performance
- resources
- service-specific section
4. Cut vanity panels
Every panel should answer a real question. If it does not, remove it.
Example Panel Sets
Elasticsearch
- cluster health
- shard allocation
- search latency
- indexing rate
- JVM heap / GC
Kafka
- broker count
- under-replicated partitions
- messages in / out
- consumer lag
- disk and network pressure
API gateway / ingress
- request rate
- p50 / p95 / p99 latency
- error rate
- upstream health
- active connections
Quality Checklist
- valid dashboard JSON
- clear section grouping
- titles and units are present
- thresholds/status colors are meaningful
- variables exist for common filters
- default time range and refresh are sensible
- no vanity panels with no operator value
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