The three dashboards to pin before your next deploy
If you’re a VP of Engineering, your job is to make deploys boring. Most deploys go wrong because the team is unsure where to look. When everything is a dashboard, nothing is a dashboard.
Before your next deploy, pin three views and agree they’re the source of truth. That’s enough to move fast and stay calm.
The three-layer stack
Change context
System health
User impact
Read from bottom to top: user impact is your truth, system health explains it, and change context tells you why.
1) A user-impact view
This is the view that answers: “Are customers feeling it?”
Examples:
- Error rate on your primary endpoint
- p95 latency for the core workflow
- Success rate for the main user action
Pick one. It should be easy to explain to a non-engineer.
2) A system health view
This view answers: “Is the system under strain?”
Examples:
- Queue depth or backlog size
- CPU or memory saturation on critical services
- DB connections or slow query count
This is the view that tells you whether to scale, shed load, or roll back.
3) A change context view
This view answers: “What changed and where?”
Examples:
- Deployment timeline
- Feature flag audit log
- Recent config changes
When the incident is tied to a change, this is how you see it quickly.
Why only three
Three dashboards fit on one screen. Three dashboards can be explained in a single sentence. Three dashboards keep everyone aligned.
If you start with more, you lose time deciding which one matters.
Add thresholds before you deploy
Decide what “bad” looks like:
- Error rate above 2 percent for 5 minutes
- Latency up 30 percent from baseline
- Queue depth growing faster than it drains
This gives you clear rollback or mitigation triggers.
Write the thresholds down in the runbook. If they live only in someone’s head, they won’t be used.
Use the same three every time
The discipline is the point. If you use the same three views for every deploy, you build confidence and speed. The team learns what normal looks like and catches drift earlier.
A simple deploy ritual
- Pin the three dashboards
- Announce the window
- Monitor for the first 10 minutes
- Decide quickly if you need to mitigate
Do this consistently and you’ll reduce firefights without adding new tools.
How we run this at DawnOps
We standardize the three views for each team:
- a user-impact metric the business can understand
- a system-health view tied to capacity risk
- a change context timeline with deploys and flags