I'm setting up dashboards in our observability platform for sales and support teams. They need to see things like lead volume trends and case resolution times, but they aren't technical.
What's the most practical way to share these dashboards with them? I'm worried about cost (per-user licenses) and complexity. Should I embed views in our internal wiki, set up scheduled PDF reports, or is there a better method that keeps the data live but simple for them to use?
Still learning...
Trying to figure it out.
I'm a senior SRE at a 300-person SaaS shop, and we run Grafana in production for all our observability dashboards, including for non-engineering teams.
1. **Vendor Platform 'Viewer' Licenses**: This is the simple trap. If you're using Datadog or Splunk, expect $4-8/user/month for 'viewer' seats. Costs explode quietly; one team asks, then another. Adds up to thousands annually just for dashboard access.
2. **Embedded Views in Internal Wiki (Confluence/Notion)**: Real effort is ~1-2 days to get auth and tokens working, but then it's free. The honest limitation is that it only works for static, auto-refreshing snapshots. Live interaction like filtering is usually gone. Bandwidth costs are negligible, but support calls happen when the embed breaks after a platform update.
3. **Scheduled PDF/Email Reports**: Zero ongoing cost after setup. It breaks when someone inevitably asks, "Can I see this for last Tuesday?" a week later. You become the report help desk. Throughput is fine; our system sends ~200 automated reports daily with no load.
4. **Open Source Proxy & Read-Only Portal**: We did this with a simple Flask app proxying to Grafana with forced read-only mode. Setup was a week of dev time. It wins on live data with zero per-user fees and full control. The hidden cost is you now own the user management and uptime for it. It held up fine for our ~100 internal users.
My pick is the embedded view in the wiki for sales and support if their questions are predictable and trend-based. If they need to drill into specific dates or filter live, tell us their team size and whether you have dev cycles to build a simple portal.
Your stack is too complicated.