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Level 8 / Project 01 - Dashboard KPI Assembler

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— This project — — Flashcards — —

Focus

  • KPI aggregation from heterogeneous metric sources
  • Threshold evaluation with traffic-light statuses
  • Trend detection (improving / stable / degrading)
  • Percentile-based statistical summaries

Why this project exists

Real dashboards pull metrics from many sources — API gateways, infrastructure agents, monitoring systems. This project teaches you to aggregate those readings, evaluate them against thresholds, and produce a structured dashboard payload — the same pattern used in Grafana, Datadog, and custom BI tools.

Run (copy/paste)

cd <repo-root>/projects/level-8/01-dashboard-kpi-assembler
python project.py --input data/sample_input.json --output data/dashboard_output.json
pytest -q

Expected terminal output

{
  "title": "Operations Dashboard",
  "overall_health": "warning",
  "counts": {"red": 0, "yellow": 1, "green": 2},
  "kpis": [...]
}
7 passed

Expected artifacts

  • data/dashboard_output.json — full dashboard payload
  • Passing tests
  • Updated notes.md

Alter it (required)

Extend this project in a meaningful way — add a feature that addresses a real use case.

Break it (required)

Introduce a subtle bug and see if your tests catch it. If they don't, write a test that would.

Fix it (required)

Review your code critically — is there a design pattern that would improve it?

Explain it (teach-back)

Could you explain the architectural trade-offs to a colleague?

Mastery check

You can move on when you can: - explain the difference between mean and p95 and why dashboards show both, - add a new KPI end-to-end (definition + samples + threshold) without looking at docs, - describe how this pattern scales to thousands of metrics per minute, - explain why trend detection needs a minimum sample count.

Mastery Check

  • Can you explain the architectural trade-offs in your solution?
  • Could you refactor this for a completely different use case?
  • Can you identify at least two alternative approaches and explain why you chose yours?
  • Could you debug this without print statements, using only breakpoint()?
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