.NET + DevOps Developer, Evidi Evidi – an IT consultancy and managed service provider based in Norway – are on a mission to help businesses harness the power of the Microsoft stack and realise their ambitions. With a large portfolio of services and a growing network of customers to manage, Evidi faced a challenge relatable to any MSP: They needed better visibility, and the solution had to be cost-effective and scalable.

SquaredUp is a flexible dashboarding and analytics platform that makes it really easy to turn your KQL queries into dashboards that you can use for monitoring or sharing. In this article, we’ll take a look at getting started with the Azure plugin for SquaredUp and build our first dashboard.

The SquaredUp motto is Measure What Matters – sometimes though, the processes that really matter can be located at numerous different points up, down and across your organisational landscape. This can make surfacing your most important measures – i.e. your KPIs – somewhat problematic. At SquaredUp, we have been thinking hard about this problem and have now released the initial version of our solution – KPI roll-ups.

As someone deeply invested in the evolution of SquaredUp, I’d like to share more about our search capability and how we designed the functionality. SquaredUp can connect to 100+ data sources, thousands of objects, tons of metrics, and and we offer many purpose-built out-of-the-box dashboards and monitors. We've deliberately designed our search experience to be able to handle the complexity of various data environments and make finding relevant information seamless and efficient.

What if I told you that you're using dashboards wrong? Imagine this: You're on a call with your team, staring at a big, static dashboard full of graphs and numbers. Someone pipes up, "Okay, so what now?" Everyone exchanges glances, unsure of how to move forward. You've got the data, but somehow, you're still stuck. If you’re nodding along, we feel you. The truth is, the way we’ve been using dashboards is outdated. They’re static. They’re rigid.

The principle of continuous improvement is central to the practice of observability. Naturally, within the data-driven philosophy of DevOps this implies an ongoing cycle of acting, measuring and improving. For many teams, the classic four DORA metrics are seen as a gold standard. As I discussed in a previous article, whilst DORA metrics are a great starting point for assessing your agile capabilities, they are not necessarily definitive.