Operations | Monitoring | ITSM | DevOps | Cloud

If you have ever owned, operated, or supported a piece of technology, you have probably built a dashboard. Maybe it started as a quick chart to answer a simple question, then quietly grew into something more important. Dashboards are often created by the people who know the systems best, the ones who can wire together data sources and click all the right buttons. But those same builders are rarely trained in how humans actually interpret data.

Mining for information about environments is like trying to find gold. Looking for gold can be sifting through silty waters or blasting through a mine. In some cases, the gold nuggets are so small as to be almost invisible, some things look like gold but aren’t, and others are larger nuggets where the miner strikes it rich. Trying to understand how a distributed system works means sifting through vast amounts of telemetry, looking for patterns.

The Iron Man’s J.A.R.V.I.S. is the artificial intelligence (AI) that almost every person wants to see. A conversational technology that answers questions like a friend would. The rise of large language models (LLMs) almost seems to give people the friendly robotic sidekick that generations of children grew up dreaming about.

Driving down the highway, you usually glance intermittently at your speedometer to ensure that you stay within the speed limit, or whatever window above the speed limit you’re willing to drive. While monitoring your speed mitigates the risk of a ticket, you still need to look out for various threats on the road, like cars going through stop signs. By observing your surroundings, you take in real-time information that can help prevent a crash.