Dashboard anxiety plagues IT pros' nights, weekends, vacations

Admins can't stop checking their portals, survey finds

A new survey confirms what many IT pros already know: downtime doesn't exist, with dashboards and alerts intruding on their free time.

More than half of the 616 IT professionals surveyed (52 percent) said they checked dashboards during nights, weekends, or vacations, with 59 percent saying past outages had left them more obsessive about making sure that everything is working. A third of IT pros said they felt compelled to check in at least once an hour.

But that's OK – it should be possible to get alerts when things aren't looking healthy, right?

While a whopping 62 percent of respondents said a dashboard alert had helped prevent a major outage, even more – 76 percent – said the relentless pings disrupted their personal lives, particularly during evenings and weekends. Almost half (43 percent) reported receiving alerts multiple times a day, which often leads to notification overload.

One user said: "False positives or unnecessary alerts constantly interrupt our flow. It's exhausting."

A worrying 30 percent of respondents said they'd experienced downtime because they hadn't reviewed their dashboard before a problem went from being a warning to a full-blown outage.

The study was commissioned by Liquid Web, a hosting outfit that is no stranger to dashboards. CTO Ryan MacDonald called for prioritization in dashboard user interface design as a way to reduce friction. He said: "The next generation of dashboards won't just monitor infrastructure, they'll restore control."

MacDonald also pointed to the use of AI - of course he did - as a way to "boost confidence and reduce noise."

Perhaps. Just over half (54 percent) of respondents believed that AI-generated summaries would save time, and slightly fewer (53 percent) said they'd speed up incident response.

However, while 34 percent would trust AI summaries more than a human technician (which arguably says more about the humans involved), 27 percent would trust them less. 39 percent remained unsure.

Although the survey highlights the inability of IT professionals to switch off, the solution – better dashboards and reporting – might not address the core problem. Rather than reducing friction in the user interface, the question needs to be asked: why do IT pros have so little faith in their systems and alerting workflows that they feel the need to keep checking in, even during downtime?

Liquid Web might have suggestions, but a lack of system resilience also needs to be addressed before harassed admins can truly relax and turn away from the baleful glow of the portal. ®