You can also use this essay to examine opportunities and pitfalls of horizontal coordination across organizations.<p>I used to work at a big tech company, but now I’m one of a few cloud devs at a startup. One day we realized we needed a dashboard, so I spun up a server and put a single binary on it that saves data to SQLite and renders HTML server-side. Dumb stuff. Took 2 days, problem solved, been humming along for a year, no plans to rewrite it.<p>Now let’s say another dev decided that they wanted to build another dashboard to monitor a service they just built. Obviously I’m gonna insist that they add on to the stuff I already built. I show them where to add the function (literally one function that makes an HTTP request and returns an error), it takes them 10 minutes instead of 2 days, and doesn’t add another entry point for attackers.<p>But now let’s say our company now has 100 devs. There’s now more status info than can fit on a single page. If you don’t do this right, the dashboard communication/management overhead at some point grows larger than the cost to develop a new dashboard.<p>What the dashboard team in OP’s article should’ve done is to create a self-service solution for making a new dashboard: here’s a big template, fill in whatever health checks you need in one of N languages, and tell us when you’re done and we’ll spot check the code and deploy it for you. That way they maintain control of all the dashboards, and teams get their dashboards way faster.<p>(Am I missing a downside, other than that the dashboard team will need to downsize?)