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What you get from this one: the dashboard you keep deferring is usually the one you're afraid of. Avoidance is the signal. Here's how to follow it.
In this drop
The point: Every team has a 'cave', the part of the system nobody instruments because they're afraid of what it'll say.
Why it matters: Avoidance isn't a neutral priority decision. It usually points straight at your biggest reliability risk.
Try this next week: Name the one number you've been not measuring, and put a single crude panel on it.
The point
I avoided building one dashboard for about a year. The cost-per-request board for a service I knew, roughly, was carrying a bad number. Every time it came up I had a reason. After the migration. The data's messy. Cardinality's expensive. All true, and all a way of not looking.
Joseph Campbell's line is the cave you fear to enter holds the treasure you seek. The practical version underneath: when you feel fear, you're usually close to something that matters. The fear is a pointer.
Every team has a cave. The legacy service nobody traces. The error budget nobody tracks because we suspect it's blown. The SLO nobody sets because setting it means admitting we're missing it. We never call it fear. We call it priorities. But nobody avoids the dashboard that makes them look good.
Reality check
The uncomfortable truth: the dashboard you keep deferring isn't low priority; it's the one you're afraid of.
One proof
Joseph Campbell's 'The Cave You Fear to Enter Holds the Treasure You Seek' is the frame; the operational version is just attention following avoidance. Field note: when I finally built that cost-per-request panel, the service was running at roughly three times the cost per request of its nearest neighbour. We'd carried a vague 'it's a bit high' for a year. One billing month with the panel up turned a feeling into a number we could actually act on.
Where this breaks
This breaks if you weaponise it. The point is to follow your own avoidance, not to interrogate someone else's backlog and call their priorities cowardice. Start with your own cave.
Try this next week
Name the one metric, service or number you've been quietly not measuring. Pick the one with the too-ready excuse, not the hardest one.
Put a single panel on it this week. Crude is fine. A rough graph of the scary thing beats a polished one of the familiar thing.
Watch for the flinch when you look. The flinch tells you that you found the right cave.
About the book
If this Signal Drop lands with you, the same thinking runs through Metrics & Mayhem: A CTO's Guide to Observability That Actually Works. Out today in paperback and hardback. Kindle's already live.
Want to taste it first? The free first chapter is yours: FREE CHAPTER.
Or skip the chapter and go straight in: BOOK LINK.
Three links I'm watching
Google SRE Workbook, 'Alerting on SLOs' (sre.google/workbook): the cleanest argument for alerting on symptoms users feel, not raw causes.
Gary Klein on the 'pre-mortem' (HBR, 2007): naming the bad outcome before it happens, the planning cousin of this idea.
Signal Drop 17, 'Position Before the Page': the positioning argument this episode sits next to.
One question for you
What's the one number you've been finding reasons not to put on a screen?
Allan
PS: The episode runs about five minutes. Listen here: SPOTIFY.
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