I think I can speak for many people in IT, in saying that when crises happen (COVID-19, large scale weather emergencies, power outages, etc.) there's always an added level of stress added. Your carefully crafted business continuity plans are put to the test and you hope that your infrastructure can handle the burden. Keeping people informed is crucial when operating in crisis mode.
Recently, Microsoft posted a great article on how to build a crisis management site. I love this idea, but it's not really an IT resource is it? It's great for policies and updates, but doesn't give me the information that I need to continue to do my job effectively in stressful times.
If you are anything like me, you're busy working the issues and don't have time for a million questions. We always say that a picture is worth a thousand words. So with that in mind what's a good dashboard worth? 6.023 x 10^23 words?
In my previous role, these are what I think resources like these would have been best on a dashboard for my company:
- Map with WAN Links
- Current VPN user count
- Number of bad VPN authentications
- Current Citrix sessions count
- Internet circuit utilization
- Some specific NetFlow for my Internet links
- Some load balancer metrics
Now, this is just what I came up with on the fly and it can't/won't apply to everyone. So my question to you is this: What makes a good dashboard for your company when you are in crisis mode? This is a discussion not a think-piece, so do not hold back on the comments and if you can share pictures, I (and the community) would love to see it.