Software/devops engineer's personal dashboard recomendations

Question

Can you recommend a free tool or GitHub project that is designed for an individual to keep up/aware of their daily tasks and operations?

For example:

• Show perf metrics from running azure VMs in graphs or tables
• Show events from application insights
• Ability to configure workflows that execute some code (like javascript on node) with a click of a button
• Call a rest API with parameters with a click of a button
• List my work items, PRs, build status from VSTS
• Show a filtered view of my mailbox on Office 365 that I configure to show important mails from the team or boss

I'm hoping that this tool would either be browser based or work as a Windows client.

I'm sure no tool exists that meets all these requirements. So if I had to build something myself then are there any good platforms that allow easy customization to make these things happen?

Any pointers?

Answer 1

For all of your read-only dashboard needs, there is Grafana with multitude of plugins, data sources and visualizations (tables, charts etc). You can also program your custom data sources pretty easily with official "simple-json-datasource" plugin.

By default, Grafana does not support buttons or other kind of form/action stuff on its own. Grafana is all about visualizing data, not modifying it. Yet, while I haven't tried it myself, Grafana supports Text/HTML/Markdown panels, I think you can implement any JavaScript logic inside those panels.

Answer 2

It sounds to me like you might get some good help by changing what you ask for. The tools that support Agile programming tick off many of these boxes. The Agile world is pretty mature, and it's unlikely you have a problem not encountered already. If you look at those tools, you'll see how they lay out kanban boards, and tickets, and software metrics, and visualizations.

GitHub ( and probably GitLab) also have a lot of developer tools. I am using Grafana, but its definitely not an execution environment, nor is JIRA without a paid extension. But Jenkins can be used for many types of tasks to kickoff whatever. For your email, create some filters for Outlook, or start using Slack, even better.