Grafana Labs · 2022
I was the original designer of Grafana’s application observability, from a hackathon project to GA. The goal: make APM work for people who don’t think in queries.
Original designer · Grafana Labs · 2022 · Shipped
I interviewed 8 current users. They couldn’t find what mattered for their own monitoring goals, and the jargon pushed newer users away.
No blank screen: “Add your first service” asks one question, what your service is written in, and shows where it will appear.
Creating the token and naming the service writes the real command for you, for a JVM flag, Docker or Kubernetes.
Step three listens for the first span and moves on by itself, with help ready if nothing arrives.
The three numbers people ask about first, then who the service calls and its slowest operations.
Timeframe Analysis lays the hour, day or week before over every chart, so “is this normal?” is answered on the page.
Visual exploration first, queries when you want them: the service map and traces live next to the overview.
Grafana Labs · 2022
I was the original designer of Grafana’s application observability, from a hackathon project to GA. The goal: make APM work for people who don’t think in queries.
Original designer · Grafana Labs · 2022 · Shipped
About the empty start · Chapter 01
I interviewed 8 current users. They couldn’t find what mattered for their own monitoring goals, and the jargon pushed newer users away.
No blank screen: “Add your first service” asks one question, what your service is written in, and shows where it will appear.
About setup · Chapter 02
Creating the token and naming the service writes the real command for you, for a JVM flag, Docker or Kubernetes.
Step three listens for the first span and moves on by itself, with help ready if nothing arrives.
About the service · Chapter 03
The three numbers people ask about first, then who the service calls and its slowest operations.
Timeframe Analysis lays the hour, day or week before over every chart, so “is this normal?” is answered on the page.
Visual exploration first, queries when you want them: the service map and traces live next to the overview.
What shipped
Visual discovery and progressive disclosure, so the same product works for an SRE and for someone opening it for the first time.
The critical outcome from our team workshops was the idea to visually answer: “What is Grafana Cloud?”
I interviewed 8 current users. The common pain point: navigating the apps to find information tailored to their own monitoring goals. Less technical users preferred visual, interactive ways of exploring, and struggled with jargon and navigation patterns that were second nature to DevOps professionals.
