Custom dashboards beat off-the-shelf for ops teams
Why we keep building custom Metabase + Retool admin tools instead of buying generic ops dashboards.
Off-the-shelf ops dashboards solve 70% of every operations team's needs. The other 30% is what makes the team good — and it never fits the template.
We use Metabase for read-mostly analytics and Retool for read-write admin actions. Both are fast to ship, easy for engineers to extend, and the editor UX is good enough for ops teams to maintain themselves.
When someone says 'we just need a dashboard for X', the right answer is almost always 'let's build it in Retool this afternoon' instead of 'let's evaluate vendors for the next two weeks'.
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