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The article is comparing fundamentally different things, which serve different purposes. Charts and gauges display "raw data". The downside of this approach is

The article is comparing fundamentally different things, which serve different purposes. Charts and gauges display "raw data". The downside of this approach is that a human has to process that data to turn it into useful information. The upside is that humans are _very_ good at this. The feed displays higher level information extracted from the raw data. On the upside, you don't have to have someone sitting around watching it. The downsides are that it requires a higher up-front investment to program or train the system to extract this information, and the system will never (given current technology) be as good as a human for any substantial correlation. The correct balance depends on your situation (resources, uptime requirements, implementation details of your system), but dashboards displaying raw or summary data that enable you to see unusual patterns, monitoring (which is very similar to a "feed"), and comprehensive stats gathering (which you won't look at on a day to day basis, but is tremendously powerful when diagnosing issues) are all tools that any team should be looking at using.

dimva 14y ago
I came here to post exactly this. Many professional Chartbeat users spend a lot of time looking at their dashboards and get an intuitive feel for how their site typically performs. From that, they can glean many insights, even some which they can't exactly describe. Chartbeat's UI tries to provide context. The dial shows the concurrents number in the context of your 30-day performance, the chart overlays your current performance on top of the same day last week, and the traffic sources show typical values, for example. That being said, we are adding more feed-type features. For example, we already offer traffic spike detection on a page level in the higher-priced Publishing product. The reason many of these features aren't present in regular Chartbeat is that they require data scientists to create a model, developers to build a system around it, and servers to actually run the calculations. None of this is free. :)

dimva 14y ago

I came here to post exactly this. Many professional Chartbeat users spend a lot of time looking at their dashboards and get an intuitive feel for how their site typically performs. From that, they can glean many insights, even some which they can't exactly describe. Chartbeat's UI tries to provide context. The dial shows the concurrents number in the context of your 30-day performance, the chart overlays your current performance on top of the same day last week, and the traffic sources show typical values, for example. That being said, we are adding more feed-type features. For example, we already offer traffic spike detection on a page level in the higher-priced Publishing product. The reason many of these features aren't present in regular Chartbeat is that they require data scientists to create a model, developers to build a system around it, and servers to actually run the calculations. None of this is free. :)