Google Cloud
Observability
Product Design, Enterprise Software
Staff UX Designer
Disclaimer
The following case study is personal and does not necessarily represent Google’s positions, strategies, or opinions. I have omitted and obfuscated confidential information.
Client
Role
Senior UX Designer
Timeframe
Type
Enterprise Software, Google Cloud Platform, Observability Tools
May 2021- Present
Overview
Cloud Observability is a suite of tools that enable users to monitor performance and gather insights about their cloud infrastructure and applications. In 2022 I began working with the Cloud Monitoring and various teams from across the Google Cloud Platform to bring observability tools to our users, wherever they find themselves in the console.
My Role
During the timeframe of this case study, I was a Senior UX Designer for the Cloud Observability team. I worked closely with a cross-functional group of product managers, technical program managers, engineers, researchers, and director-level stakeholders from the Google Cloud Platform.
Challenge
Cloud Observability is a critical component of the Google Cloud Platform ecosystem, providing insight into the health and performance of cloud infrastructure. However, until 2022, Cloud Observability was treated like a standalone product, without much integration into the broader Google Cloud Platform. We needed to change our thinking and start bringing observability to our users, meeting them where they are.
Approach
Partnership
In our attempt to more tightly integrate Observability tools into the platform, we needed first to understand where and how we could make the greatest impact for our users. We started by researching which products had the greatest need for observability data in their day-to-day use. We quickly identified Google Kubernetes Engine, and Google Compute Engine as our top priority integration partner products. Working with Observability product managers, I built a case for why a tight partnership between teams would be mutually beneficial to both users and the Google Cloud Platform. The teams agreed, and we began collaborating on our first dashboards together.
Research
We needed a clear understanding of what the customers of these products wanted in terms of observability. We began an ongoing series of rolling user interviews and rapid research sessions with two primary personas: Cloud Operators and Application Developers. Our research revealed a sort of Venn diagram of needs across users. Operators were more concerned with bigger-picture system health metrics, whereas Application Developers were focused on golden signals associated with their specific application. We needed to be able to serve their unique and shared needs in a way that was intuitive and contextual, while also grappling with the existing information architecture of Google Cloud Platform.
Out-of-the-box dashboards
After completing our research and generating requirements, we set to work to create our new in-context experience in Google Kubernetes Engine and Google Compute Engine. We built an Observability tab for each resource (Clusters, Workloads, VM Instances, etc.) in their respective products. The Observability tab is populated with out-of-the-box dashboards and organized through an inline tree menu, and groups dashboards by infrastructure or application content. When inspecting their resources, users can quickly flip to the observability tab to see high-level infrastructure health signals and granular golden signals tied to applications running on the infrastructure.
We released our first dashboards to great success. We saw in the first year of release a 900% increase in monthly active users of observability tied to our in-context dashboards, making these dashboards the most used in all of Cloud Observability.
Scaling up
With the success of in-context dashboards, the team was inundated with requests from other teams throughout the Google Cloud Platform to form new partnerships. This presented a problem; Cloud Observability did not have the staff to support every integration engagement indefinitely, while still supporting our core product. We needed another solution to help us scale up.
Universal Dashboard Framework:
One of the key features of Cloud Observability as a standalone product is our dashboard builder. Users can build custom dashboards that pull in data from assets across the platform, and leverage many different types of visualization to achieve their goals. Our in-context dashboards, while being good standalone dashboards, were not customizable. If we could take Cloud Observability’s dashboard builder, and turn it into a reusable framework, we could turn any observability dashboard in the platform into a customizable board. This would also enable us to empower individual product teams to leverage their deep user expertise to build their dashboards. Thus, the Universal Dashboard Framework was born.
We needed to develop a UI framework that could be flexible enough to work in many different contexts. This required supporting both full-page and partial-page layouts, while still incorporating the latest dashboard features and editing capabilities which were designed for full-page experiences. To better understand these constraints, I conducted an audit of products across the platform to better understand the space constraints that UDF would need to operate within.
After several rounds of iteration and consultation with prospective partner teams, we developed the in-context dashboard control bar. The controls allow the user to create new dashboard views and toggle between them while leveraging a simplified set of controls. These controls allow the user to make use of Observability’s newest functionality and create parity between the in-context dashboards and Observability dashboards.
Results
The introduction of UDF has accelerated the adoption of Observability dashboards throughout the Google Cloud Platform. We exceeded our adoption goal by 3x in 2023, and we saw a 50% increase in repeat use of our premier Google Kubernetes and Google Compute Engine dashboards since their conversion to the UDF framework. In acknowledgment of the success and far-reaching impact of this work, I was awarded the Cloud Technical Impact Award in 2024.
What people are saying…
Director Product O11Y
“Thank you Ashley for your leadership and collaboration in creating a holistic OIC experience for GCP customers that not only solves the user needs but also brings together the various capabilities that Cloud Ops has to offer in a meaningful way.”
Technical Lead Cloud Observability