| name | sre-dashboards |
| description | Design and operationalize SRE dashboards that surface reliability, latency, error, saturation, and capacity signals across services. Use when building observability views for SLOs, incident response, and executive reliability reporting. |
| license | MIT |
| metadata | {"author":"devops-skills","version":"1.0"} |
SRE Dashboards
Build dashboards that help teams detect, triage, and prevent reliability incidents.
When to Use This Skill
Use this skill when:
- Defining service-level dashboards for production systems
- Tracking SLO health and error-budget burn
- Creating incident command-center views
- Standardizing dashboard patterns across teams
Prerequisites
- Metrics pipeline (Prometheus, OpenTelemetry, or vendor equivalent)
- Logs/traces linked to services and environments
- Agreed service taxonomy (team, service, tier, environment)
Dashboard Architecture
Structure dashboards in layers:
- Executive Reliability View: SLO attainment, incident counts, MTTR trends.
- Service Health View: RED/USE metrics, dependency health, release markers.
- Deep-Dive View: Per-endpoint latency, resource saturation, error categories.
Keep each view answer-oriented:
- Are customers impacted?
- What changed?
- Where is the bottleneck?
Core SRE Panels
Golden Signals
- Latency: p50/p95/p99 request duration by endpoint
- Traffic: request throughput and queue depth
- Errors: 5xx rate, failed jobs, timeout ratio
- Saturation: CPU, memory, disk I/O, thread/connection pool exhaustion
SLO Panels
- Current SLI value (rolling windows: 5m, 1h, 24h, 30d)
- Error-budget remaining (%)
- Burn-rate panels (fast and slow windows)
- Multi-window burn alert status
Change Correlation
- Deployment markers and config-change annotations
- Feature flag state overlays
- Upstream/downstream dependency error rates
Example PromQL Snippets
# API error rate (%)
100 * sum(rate(http_requests_total{status=~"5.."}[5m]))
/ sum(rate(http_requests_total[5m]))
# p95 latency by route
histogram_quantile(0.95,
sum by (le, route) (rate(http_request_duration_seconds_bucket[5m]))
)
# Fast burn rate (5m / 1h)
(
sum(rate(http_requests_total{status=~"5.."}[5m]))
/ sum(rate(http_requests_total[5m]))
)
/
(
sum(rate(http_requests_total{status=~"5.."}[1h]))
/ sum(rate(http_requests_total[1h]))
)
Operational Guidelines
- Use consistent color semantics (green=healthy, yellow=degrading, red=breach)
- Label units explicitly (ms, req/s, %, cores)
- Default time windows to incident-friendly ranges (15m, 1h, 6h, 24h)
- Minimize panel count per dashboard to reduce cognitive load
- Add runbook links directly in panel descriptions
Troubleshooting
Panel appears flat or empty
- Verify label cardinality and filters (
service, env, region)
- Confirm scrape/ingest latency is within expected range
- Check metric rename regressions after instrumentation updates
High cardinality slows dashboards
- Aggregate by stable dimensions (
service, route_group) instead of raw IDs
- Use recording rules for expensive percentile and ratio queries
- Split deep-dive dashboards from NOC summary dashboards
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