Dashboard organization isn't about folders — it's about visibility

Having well-organized dashboards is just as important as having good dashboards.

But dashboard organization shouldn’t just make things easy to find. It should provide structure that supports collaboration and efficient troubleshooting. It has to be more than a basic folder system.

This post looks at how classic dashboarding tools handle organization today, where they fall short, and how SquaredUp Workspaces organize for visibility and shared context.

Your conventional dashboarding tools are missing something

Conventional dashboarding tools give you folders, tags, and lists to organize dashboards. That helps with storage, but it doesn’t provide the context you need when something goes wrong.

They don’t show health or ownership, how components connect, or what’s affected when something fails.

The shift from storing to seeing

Workspaces in SquaredUp take a different approach. A workspace isn't just a folder for dashboards, it represents a context — a team, a service, an application, a platform, a region, and so on. Workspaces are designed to reflect your organization and how it is structured.

Each workspace then encapsulates monitoring specific to that context:

• Dashboards for visibility
• Monitors and alert notification rules
• A summary of health and KPIs that can “roll up” to higher level views
• Dependency maps that connect one workspace to another

Workspaces also come with ownership, health, and visibility built in. So when a failure occurs, the ambiguity disappears. The health is visible, the ownership is clear, and everyone's working from the same context.

Health RollUps — getting the big picture

Workspaces combine with a feature called RollUp to convert your low-level monitoring into a high-level status view that management and operations teams can easily understand.

Say a monitor fails on one of your tiles. That failure doesn't just sit there, it ‘rolls up’ from the tile to the dashboard, and then to the workspace itself. So when you land on your organization home page, you're not just looking at a sea of alerts. You're looking at the health of every team, every service, every app, and all the monitors, KPIs, and data sources tied to that context.

Red, amber, green — you can see the state of everything at a glance.

Seeing dependencies, not just guessing

Each workspace in SquaredUp has a map. It's an interactive model of how things within that workspace connect and depend on each other. So if something goes wrong, you can see what it's affecting and what it depends on. This cross-silo visibility avoids the need to even form the ‘war room’ where dependencies are guessed and vital time is lost.

If you want to dive deeper into how maps work, you can read more in
A dive into health roll-up - SquaredUp.

Not everyone needs to see everything…

Some silos exist for a reason, and it may not be necessary or appropriate for everyone to see the details. Workspaces act as a basis for access control and abstraction.

Workspace access control let you set permissions for viewer, editor, or full control – a team may have full control to modify dashboards and monitoring while dependent teams may only have viewer permissions.

Workspace status and KPIs allow you to surface key signals externally, abstracting the details into easy-to-consume signals for other teams.

Combined, your teams only see and work with what's relevant to them without losing shared context.

Breaking down silos with SquaredUp Workspaces

One of the most important benefits of workspaces is how they break down silos. When everything lives in one place — health, KPIs, data sources, maps — teams working on the same service or application are all looking at the same thing. And when something goes wrong, everyone can see the same reality.

That’s what “well organized” means with modern dashboards: organizing for visibility and shared context, not just folders.