The latest articles on DEV Community by Mehdi GMIRA (@mehdi_gmira_8a46071ba909f). https://dev.to/mehdi_gmira_8a46071ba909f https://media2.dev.to/dynamic/image/width=90,height=90,fit=cover,gravity=auto,format=auto/https:%2F%2Fdev-to-uploads.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fuploads%2Fuser%2Fprofile_image%2F3654041%2F79026750-ef2d-48f9-99c8-dc07dbfdc7d7.jpg https://dev.to/mehdi_gmira_8a46071ba909f en Mehdi GMIRA Tue, 09 Dec 2025 16:13:52 +0000 https://dev.to/mehdi_gmira_8a46071ba909f/why-your-support-team-cant-use-grafana-1941 https://dev.to/mehdi_gmira_8a46071ba909f/why-your-support-team-cant-use-grafana-1941 <p>I've been building B2B SaaS for 10 years, and there's one loop I've never escaped:</p> <p>Support gets a ticket: "What's happening with our data import?"</p> <p>They ping engineering. Someone drops what they're doing, opens Grafana, filters, squints at some graphs, screenshots it, pastes it in Slack. Support forwards a cropped version to the customer.</p> <p>Repeat 5x a day. 🤯</p> <p><strong>The tools exist, but not for everyone</strong></p> <p>Grafana and Datadog are incredible for devs. But I'd never hand them to support, let alone a customer.</p> <p>Why?</p> <ul> <li> <strong>PromQL</strong>: "Just use <code>rate(http_requests_total{customer_id="acme"}[5m])</code>" is not something I can teach to someone in support</li> <li> <strong>Infrastructure-centric</strong>: Everything is organized by pods, services, instances. Not customers.</li> <li> <strong>Trace IDs</strong>: Useful for debugging, meaningless to anyone outside engineering</li> <li> <strong>Dashboards assume expertise</strong>: Gauges vs counters vs histograms shouldn't matter if you just want to know "is this customer's workflow stuck?"</li> </ul> <p>So we build internal admin panels. Or we stay in the loop forever.</p> <p><strong>What I'm trying instead</strong></p> <p>I started building <a href="https://github.com/towlabs/dashfrog" rel="noopener noreferrer">DashFrog</a> — open source, customer-scoped observability.</p> <p>The idea:</p> <ul> <li>Organize everything by customer, not infrastructure</li> <li>Abstract away the OTEL complexity — spans become "Flows" you can follow step by step, metrics just work without needing to know what a histogram is</li> <li>Let anyone on your team explore what's happening with a customer</li> <li>Share views directly with customers when needed</li> </ul> <p>It sits on OpenTelemetry, so if you're already using OTEL, you can pipe data in. But what shows up in DashFrog is designed for humans, not SREs.</p> <p><strong>Still early</strong></p> <p>I'm not pretending this is finished. I shipped it this week and I'm looking for feedback from anyone who's felt this pain.</p> <p>If you're running B2B SaaS and tired of being the Grafana-to-Slack bridge, I'd love to hear:</p> <ul> <li>Does this problem resonate?</li> <li>What would you need to actually use something like this?</li> </ul> <p>Repo: <a href="https://github.com/towlabs/dashfrog" rel="noopener noreferrer">https://github.com/towlabs/dashfrog</a></p> opensource monitoring observability