# Metric targets > The viewer wants the dashboard to know what 'good' is. - Canonical: https://patterns.konigi.com/dashboards/metric-targets - Group: Product mechanics - Level: flow - Status: published - Updated: September 10, 2026 - Also called: set a goal, target line --- ## Problem Latency is 340ms. Whether that is fine depends on a number that currently lives in someone's head, in a slide from last quarter, or in a threshold field on a panel nobody has opened since it was created. ## Solution Make the target a first-class object. Something with a value, an owner, a review date and a definition of the metric it applies to, referenced by every panel and alert that needs it rather than retyped into each. The distinction from a threshold is where most of the value is. A threshold is a number on a panel. A target is a commitment with provenance: who set it, when, against what, and what happens when it is missed. Panels reference it; they do not own it. The SRE framing is the most developed version and worth borrowing wholesale. An SLO is a target for a service level indicator, and the derived quantity—error budget, the amount of failure the objective permits—turns out to be far more useful than the target itself. A budget converts a binary into a rate: not "are we meeting it" but "how fast are we spending the allowance, and will it last the quarter". That reframing is what makes a target actionable on a Tuesday rather than only at a quarter boundary. Three properties separate a target that works from a number in a config file. **Ownership.** A target with no name attached cannot be revised, only ignored. **A review date.** Traffic grows, systems change, and an unreviewed target is wrong within a year and still colouring panels. **Reachability.** The target should be visible where the metric is, and its definition reachable from there. A goal nobody can find the reasoning for gets treated as arbitrary, and arbitrary targets get gamed or dismissed. Few's bullet graph is the display counterpart: it exists precisely to show a measure against a target and qualitative ranges in one compact strip, which is what a target-aware panel should look like. ## Use when Someone has genuinely committed to a number, the commitment has consequences, and multiple surfaces need to agree about it. ## Don't use when The number is aspirational or nobody owns it. A target nobody is accountable for teaches viewers that targets on this dashboard are decorative, and that lesson transfers to the ones that matter. ## Trade-offs Targets create incentive, and incentive creates gaming: the metric improves and the thing it was standing in for does not. They also age badly and rarely have a process for revision, so a display can be confidently red against a goal set for a system that no longer exists. Making targets first-class is real product work—storage, permissions, history, versioning—which is why most tools leave them as per-panel thresholds. And a single target flattens a distribution: hitting a p95 target while the p99 doubles is a pass that hides a real deterioration. ## Checklist - Who owns this target, and do they know? - When was it last reviewed, and when is it next due? - Is the metric definition it applies to unambiguous and reachable? - Is the target stored once and referenced, or retyped per panel? - Does the display show distance to target, not only current value? - Is there a budget or rate framing, or only a pass/fail? - What happens when it is missed—does anything at all change? - Could this target be met while the underlying goal is not? - Does the alert that fires use the same number the panel draws? - Is the history of the target visible, so a change is not silent? ## Compare **Honeycomb** treats SLOs as objects with budget burn as the primary display, which is the fullest expression of the pattern and the one that answers "should I act now" rather than only "am I over". **Grafana** has no target concept: goals live as per-panel thresholds, so the same objective is retyped across dashboards and drifts independently in each. **Datadog** offers SLOs as first-class entities with their own status and history, so a target has a page rather than a field. **Looker** and BI tools generally push targets into the modelling layer, which makes them consistent everywhere and makes changing one an engineering task rather than a product decision. ## Related Target and progress is the display half, and covers the bullet graph properly. Threshold line is what a target usually degrades into when nobody owns it. Alert rule is what should reference the target rather than carry its own copy of the number. Explain this metric matters more here than anywhere, since a target on an ambiguous metric is an argument waiting to happen. KPI tile is where a target most often should appear and usually doesn't. ## Examples ### Grafana (Grafana Labs) The reference implementation for panel grids, template variables, and stat panels; most other tools are defined by how they differ from it. **Grafana SLO / SLO Overview** — captured September 10, 2026, Grafana Play (signed out; no version string exposed). tactical, dense density, dark theme, desktop-web. Twenty-eight objectives, each a row carrying a 28-day indicator, the budget remaining, and a sparkline. The budget column is where it comes apart. Four rows read −1900%, −1815%, −1093% and −463%. A budget is the amount of failure an objective permits, so it bottoms out at −100% and everything past that is the display reporting how wrong the target was rather than how broken the service is. Those four sit in the same column, in the same type, as a row reading 99.8%. Two rows above them an objective reports "No data" in the same red, which is a third thing again and looks like the second. Meanwhile eleven rows sit at exactly 100.0% with a full budget—objectives that cannot fire. The sparkline column is scaled per row, so one row's axis runs 0 to 200% and its neighbour's runs 96 to 100, and the shapes are not comparable down the page even though the layout invites exactly that. Hotspots in this capture: - [Metric targets](https://patterns.konigi.com/dashboards/metric-targets) *(this pattern)* — The budget column: the derived quantity that turns a target from a binary into a rate. - [Target and progress](https://patterns.konigi.com/dashboards/target-and-progress) — Budget left, −1900%. Past −100% the number is measuring the objective, not the service. - [Error and stale state](https://patterns.konigi.com/dashboards/error-and-stale-state) — No data, in the same red as a breach. A third state wearing the second one's colour. - [Small multiples](https://patterns.konigi.com/dashboards/small-multiples) — A column of sparklines, each on its own axis. One runs 0–200%, the next 96–100%. - [Header KPI strip](https://patterns.konigi.com/dashboards/header-kpi-strip) — Five tiles counting targets, objectives and series. None of them says whether any of it is met. ## Related patterns - [Target and progress](https://patterns.konigi.com/dashboards/target-and-progress) — The number only matters relative to a goal, and the viewer needs to see distance to it. - [Threshold line and region](https://patterns.konigi.com/dashboards/threshold-line) — A flat metric has a line it must not cross, and the chart should show where that line is. - [Alert rule attached to panel](https://patterns.konigi.com/dashboards/alert-rule) — The chart shows the line to watch; the viewer wants to be told when it's crossed. - [Explain this metric](https://patterns.konigi.com/dashboards/explain-this-metric) — Two people read the same tile and mean different things by it. - [KPI tile](https://patterns.konigi.com/dashboards/kpi-tile) — A person needs to know the current value of one number, and whether it's fine, before they look at anything else. ## Sources - [Google SRE Book, Service Level Objectives](https://sre.google/sre-book/service-level-objectives/) - [Honeycomb, SLOs That Tell the Whole Story](https://www.honeycomb.io/blog/service-level-objectives-reducing-mttr) - [Stephen Few, Bullet Graph Design Specification](https://www.perceptualedge.com/articles/misc/Bullet_Graph_Design_Spec.pdf) --- Screenshots on patterns.konigi.com are reproduced for commentary and criticism. 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