Dashboards are great. They help teams monitor system health, track key metrics, and spot when things start to go off track. When latency spikes or error rates rise, a good dashboard shows you when it started and often where. Mature teams build them thoughtfully and rely on them daily.
But dashboards have limits. They show that something happened, might tell you what happened, but rarely explain why. They compress rich telemetry into trend lines and charts, which is great for spotting patterns. But when things break, you need more than a pattern. You need the story behind it.

What Dashboards Don’t Show

The One Request That Broke Everything
Dashboards show you metrics like 99th percentile latency, but they won’t point to the exact request or user that tipped the system over. You know something was slow. You don’t know who or what caused it.

The Actual Sequence of Events
You see a spike. But was it a retry storm? A timeout cascade? Dashboards don’t follow a request across services or show the logs it triggered along the way.

The Whole Picture
Metrics in one view, logs in another, traces in a third, you’re left juggling tabs, aligning timestamps, and guessing how things connect.

The Questions You Didn’t Plan For
Incidents never follow the script. Want to know which user actions led to checkout failures during the flash sale? If you didn’t pre-build that view, your dashboard can’t help.

Dashboards show you there’s a fire. They don’t tell you where it started or how far it spread.

Now picture this: It’s 3 AM on Black Friday. The checkout just went down. You’re losing $50K a minute. Dashboards are lit up - error rates climbing, latency spiking, CPU maxed out. You even know it started at 3:14 AM, right after a deployment.

But what failed? Checkout runs on 47 microservices. Is it payments? Inventory? Database? Something else? You know there’s trouble, but not what triggered it.

The Real Need: Context, Correlation, and Root Cause

Modern systems don’t break cleanly. A single user request can bounce between dozens of services, span multiple containers, and touch regions across the globe, all in sub-seconds.

When something goes wrong, fixing it isn’t about staring at a spike on a chart. It’s about tracing that request end-to-end. For that, you need to:

• Trace the request end-to-end
• Pull the logs tied to each service it touched
• See user IDs, regions, and deployments all in one flow

In our checkout example, that might mean tracing a single cart failure across payments, inventory, auth, and DB. This isn’t something dashboards were made to handle. You need context, and you need to move fast.

CtrlB: The Context-First Approach

CtrlB Explore is built for moments like this, when alerts are going off and dashboards are full of red, but you still don’t know what exactly broke. Instead of showing you that something failed, CtrlB helps you find the specific request that triggered the failure.
You search: user_id:12345 checkout failed. Instantly, you get the full trace of that request, along with the logs it produced and the services it touched. No regrets about not having a dashboard view ready. 

And it doesn’t stop at one request. CtrlB lets you see the full journey, how that request flowed from the mobile app to the API gateway, then to the payment service, and down to the database. Every hop, error, timeout, and retry all stitched together automatically.

Got a mystery bug from three months ago still haunting your postmortems? CtrlB stores everything in S3. You can query old incidents like they just happened, with no missing data and no reindexing needed.

And you don’t need to switch between five tools just to get the story straight. CtrlB brings logs, traces, and service metadata into one place, already correlated, so you’re not wasting time syncing timestamps across Grafana, Splunk, and Jaeger. Dashboards help you see when something’s wrong. CtrlB helps you find out what went wrong, where, and why.

Where Dashboards End, CtrlB Picks Up

Dashboards still matter. They’re great for watching traffic, uptime, and overall system health. But when things break, you don’t want to be staring at a spike, guessing what went wrong.

You want to see the exact request that failed. The services it touched. The logs it left behind. You want a system that tells the full story. That’s what CtrlB was built for. Stop guessing. Start understanding. Start with CtrlB.