CTO Dashboards & Reports : Benefits, KPIs, Metrics

CTO dashboards and reports give at-a-glance status of technology infrastructure and allows CTO’s to quickly identify and fix issues. Here are the key benefits, KPIs and metrics for CTO dashboards and reports.

CTO Dashboards & Reports : Benefits, KPIs, Metrics

What is a CTO Dashboard

CTO dashboard is a visual collection of key IT KPIs and metrics about your business technology and infrastructure. It is meant for CTO’s and other senior level IT executives such as VP, Product Manager, IT manager, etc.

CTO dashboard gives at-a-glance status of how your technology stack is doing, helps you measure performance, identify issues and fix them early.

Most CTO dashboards automatically gather, consolidate, analyze and report data points from various technology assets of an organization, making it easy to get insights from a wide range of data sources, and make better decisions.

Bonus Read : How to Create Operational Dashboard for Your Business

What are CTO Reports

CTO reports are basically static version of CTO dashboards. While CTO dashboards show live data, CTO reports are periodic snapshots of the same information, or more summarized data points.

CTO reports also help IT employees track performance compared to IT goals.

Mostly, CTO reports are PDF exports of CTO dashboards that are automatically emailed to key stakeholders and decision makers who are too busy to regularly check-in on live CTO dashboards.

Bonus Read : Top 5 SaaS KPI Metrics for Your Business

Benefits of CTO Dashboard

Here are the key benefits of CTO dashboards. They

Provide Single point of information about IT infrastructure
Collect and report data from diverse data sources
Simplify and present data visually
Send automatic alerts in case of issues
Send automated email reports to key stakeholders
Provide at-a-glance status of vital technology stats
Can be accessed anywhere, anytime, on any device

Bonus Read : Top 5 DevOps Metrics & KPIs to Monitor

How to Create CTO Dashboard

Here are the steps to create CTO Dashboard and Report

1. Understand Your Target Audience

Find out who will use your dashboards, how and why. They may be CTOs, IT Managers, Product managers, etc. This will help you show relevant information in your CTO dashboard. For example, a CTO will need a comprehensive overview of all technology assets, while a product manager will be interested only in his/her product’s vital stats. Conduct 2-3 meetings to understand their goals, what they are in-charge of, and what metrics matter to them.

2. Identify CTO KPIs and Metrics

Understand your audience’s business goals and objectives. Find out what metrics and KPIs they use to measure their performance against these goals. Ask them if there is anything more/different that they would like to see on their dashboards.

Also, find out how they get this information (via email, web portals, PDF, etc) and how frequently they need it.

3. Design Dashboard Mockup

Once you have a clear idea of your dashboard, use a dashboard software to quickly create a mock up. Organize KPIs & metrics on your dashboard, in a top-down manner, with the most important metrics at the top, trends & distributions in the middle, and granular details at the bottom.

Make sure you choose the right visualization for each KPI metric to avoid confusing your audience.

Conduct 2-3 meetings with key stakeholders & decision makers to review your dashboard mock up, get sign off and start building your dashboard.

Bonus Read : Key Website Performance Metrics & KPIs

CTO KPIs and metrics

Here are the key CTO KPIs and Metrics you must track on your CTO dashboards and reports.

1. Requests Per Second

Requests per second measures the number of requests processed by your server per second. It gives a good idea about the server performance, concurrency and server load.

2. Throughput

Throughput is the amount of data received and sent by your website server per second. It helps you measure and optimize data costs.

3. Number of Errors

It is important to track all the errors that occur when people use your website/app. So measure the overall number of errors per day, as well as break them down by error codes to find out and fix most common errors.

4. Average Response Time

Average Response time is the average amount of time your server takes to process a request. If your website/app’s average response time is high, then it means your server is under heavy load. Monitor average response time throughout the day to find out when your server gets overloaded.

5. Top Pages with Page Load Time

Page Load time is the amount of time it takes to load a web page on your website. It is important to track the top 5 pages with most page load time, as they will increase your average response time. Identify those pages and determine if you can reduce their page load time.

6. Most Frequent Requests

It is also important to track the 5 most requested URLs to ensure there are no bottlenecks in serving them. Otherwise, they will spoil user experience and reduce customer satisfaction.

Bonus Read : Key Server Performance Metrics to Track Regularly