Behind our financial dashboard

We started Scout to make monitoring server infrastructure easier. With our heads deep in code, it took us a while to realize that monitoring our business was just as important. Here’s a look at the financial dashboard we created (as you’ll guess, the data isn’t real):

Financial Dashboard

Key Components

Takeaway: build this early

We were Rails developers, not seasoned entrepreneurs, when we started Scout. We wrote code our clients asked for. If our code worked, our clients were happy.

We’ve learned that deciding which code to write is 90% of writing code. Our financial dashboard is a big factor in our decision process. It’s the first thing we see on login. The impact of every decision bubbles up to this page.

The most telling thing about business instrumentation? I’ve never felt developer-remorse adding more of it.

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