What's the difference between alerts and dashboards?

Dashboards are a pull mechanism, you go to them to see your game's health and investigate, great for exploring and understanding with depth and context. Alerts are a push mechanism, they come to you when something happens (a crash spike, a new issue), great for catching problems without having to watch. Dashboards are passive (only help when you look); alerts are active (they find you). They're complementary.

Should I rely on a dashboard to catch problems?

Not on its own, a dashboard is passive and only helps when you remember to look, so a crash spike that happens when you're not watching goes unnoticed until you next open it. To catch problems reliably, pair the dashboard with alerts that push notifications to you (ideally into Discord or Slack) the moment something goes wrong. Then alerts catch the problem and the dashboard lets you investigate it, a complete loop rather than relying on remembering to check.

Alerts vs Dashboards

Q: Do I need both alerts and dashboards?

Yes, they complement each other. Alerts catch problems and pull you in (so you don't have to remember to check), while dashboards let you investigate and understand once you're looking. The workflow is alert-then-dashboard: an alert notifies you of a crash spike, and you open the dashboard to diagnose and fix it. Alerts without dashboards leave you unable to dig in; dashboards without alerts leave you missing problems that happen when you're not looking.

Quick answer: Dashboards are pull, you go look at them; alerts are push, they come to you when something happens. Dashboards are great for exploring; alerts are great for catching problems without watching.

Alerts and dashboards are two ways to consume monitoring data, and they're complementary rather than competing: one pulls you in, the other pushes to you. Knowing when to use each makes your monitoring effective. Here's the comparison.

What Dashboards Are For

A dashboard is a pull mechanism: you go to it to see your game's health, crash rates, top issues, trends. Dashboards are excellent for exploring and understanding, digging into the data, comparing versions, investigating an issue. Their strength is depth and context, a rich view you actively examine.

Bugnet's dashboard shows your crashes grouped and ranked, your crash-free rate, per-version trends. Dashboards are where you investigate and understand, but their weakness is that they're passive, they only help when you remember to look, so they don't catch problems on their own.

What Alerts Are For

An alert is a push mechanism: it comes to you when something happens, a crash spike, a new issue, an error surge, often into Discord or Slack where you already are. Alerts are great for catching problems without watching, you don't have to remember to check, because the alert finds you.

Bugnet's alerting surfaces spikes and new issues, so problems reach you. Alerts' strength is immediacy and not requiring attention, but their weakness is brevity, an alert tells you something's wrong, not the full story, which is where the dashboard comes in.

Why You Need Both

They complement each other: alerts catch problems and pull you in; dashboards let you investigate once you're there. The workflow is alert-then-dashboard, an alert notifies you of a crash spike, and you open the dashboard to understand and fix it. Alerts without dashboards leave you unable to dig in; dashboards without alerts leave you missing problems.

Bugnet provides both, alerting to catch problems and a dashboard to investigate them. So use alerts to be told when something needs attention (so you don't have to watch) and dashboards to explore and understand (once you're looking), since together they form a complete monitoring loop: notified by alerts, informed by dashboards.

Dashboards are pull (you go look, great for investigating); alerts are push (they come to you, great for catching problems without watching). Use alerts to be told, dashboards to dig in. You need both.