Remote Dashboard Concept Visual Design, UX Design

Remote monitoring applications for Ubuntu/Linux systems are abundant but are often made by server admins for server admins and generally have a very poor user experience or visual design. I run a headless server at home for a variety of uses and often times are in need of remote monitoring tool to ensure the system isn’t having issues or that my network drives are not full, etc.

I thought it would be interesting to see what kind of dashboard application that I would want for myself so I took a crack and designing one, visually.

One thing a dashboard should be is information can be detailed, but it should also be quick to read. I accomplish this through the use of colors to indicate the state of a datapoint rather than focusing on absolutes. Absolute values should be easily accessed but not necessarily always up front and center.

For example, in the images below there are graphs of data expressed in a span of time: at a glancing level, I don’t need to clutter the space with timestamps for each datapoint. I only need to know the time information when something needs further investigation and the case of the image below I can hover over a particular data point to see when the event happened and perhaps what has happened.