What You Model is What You Get: A Model-Driven Dashboard Generation Approach

Abstract

Systems of Systems are large and complex systems that need to be continuously monitored for malfunctions and unexpected behaviors. To this end, operators have to configure their dashboards, so that the right set of indicator is properly visualized. Unfortunately, cost-effectively manipulating dashboards is a challenge, sometime also for expert users.This paper proposes a Model-driven approach for the cost-effective definition and modification of dashboards. The key idea is that a model-based representation of a dashboard can be more easily manipulated than interacting with the GUI of dashboard management systems. Once a dashboard's model is defined, the actual dashboard can be generated automatically with model-transformation techniques. Our empirical results with Grafana dashboards inspected by experts show that the model-driven approach can be used to cost-effectively generate useful dashboards, with an effectiveness close to the one of experts.

Keywords: dashboard generation, Model-Driven Engineering, KPI, Grafana