We built this because we ran 17 dashboards nobody opened during incidents.

ChartlessOps is an opinionated signal panel built by two ex-Booking.com SREs in Amsterdam. We started in 2024 because we’d both lived through enough incident retrospectives to know that the dashboards weren’t the thing that helped.

The afternoon that made us start.

In autumn 2023 the two of us were on the same incident call. Payments was degraded. We had 17 Grafana folders, 142 dashboards, 9 PagerDuty alerts already firing. The first 8 minutes of the call were spent figuring out which dashboard mattered. Two more were spent watching one of our colleagues click through them while everyone else waited.

The thing that finally answered the question “is payments OK?” was someone running a one-off SQL query against the payments service’s success-rate counter and reading the number out loud. The dashboards were the wallpaper. The thing we actually needed was a number, and a status: red or green.

We left Booking.com in February 2024 to build the thing we wished we’d had on that call.

// the dashboards were the wallpaper.
the thing we needed was a number,
and a status: red or green.

What we ended up with.

ChartlessOps is the opposite of a dashboard wall. One page, one row per service, one signal per row. The signal is the thing that actually answers “is this service OK right now?” — latency, error rate, queue depth, whatever’s right for that service.

We pull from your existing metrics store (Prometheus, Datadog, CloudWatch, whatever you have) and condense. We don’t replace your observability stack. We sit on top of it as the panel that nobody’s afraid to look at during an incident.

Service definitions are YAML in a Git repo — chartlessops.yml — so the panel itself is versioned, reviewed, and rolled back like the rest of your infrastructure.

How we run the company.

We’re two people. We’re bootstrapped. We’ve been customer-funded since month five. Our growth target is “cover salaries, reinvest the rest, hire when the on-call email queue gets heavy.”

There’s no growth team. There’s no sales team. We answer email ourselves. The roadmap is public. Pricing won’t silently increase. We’ll keep the data-source integration API stable. We’ll deprecate before we remove.