‹ All work
Desktop & Tablet,
IBM,
2026
Redesigning the IBM Storage Ceph Dashboard
Redesigned the monitoring experience to make complex storage health, capacity, and performance data easier to understand - helping administrators investigate issues and monitor their clusters with less reliance on custom Grafana dashboards.
Company
IBM
Role
Lead product designer
Team
3 Engineers, 1 PM, 1 UX Designer, 1 UX Writer
Timeline
10 weeks
Platform
Desktop & Tablet
The short version
1 min
Problem
The dashboard lacked clarity for beginners and depth for experts, limiting its usefulness as a primary monitoring tool.
What I did
Reorganized the dashboard around health, capacity and performance in IBM's Carbon design language, with a clear overview first and deeper detail on demand.
Result
Created a more intuitive monitoring experience for new and experienced users, bringing critical cluster insights into one place and reducing reliance on external monitoring tools.
My role
Owned the end-to-end UX design, from research and heuristic evaluation to design strategy, interaction design, and developer collaboration.
Context
IBM Storage Ceph's dashboard exposed a lot of technical information, but it didn't always help administrators understand what needed attention. New users struggled to interpret the system's health, while experienced administrators often turned to CLI tools and external monitoring dashboards to get the detail they needed.
The dashboard showed the data, but not always what mattered
Storage administrators rely on the dashboard to understand the state of their cluster, spot potential problems, and monitor resource consumption. But the existing experience made it difficult to turn technical information into a clear picture of system health.
Custom grafana dashboard built by admin to monitor ceph cluster.
My role
I led the UX redesign to bring health, capacity, and performance into a clearer, more cohesive monitoring experience - one that could serve both new and experienced administrators without compromising the depth of a complex storage platform.
Research
Understanding the gaps in the existing experience
I used a mixed-methods research approach combining past research (Ceph Consumability 24Q3 — JP Lynch), quantitative community data (Ceph community engagement surveys) with qualitative stakeholder studies — 6 stakeholder interviews conducted across roles like IBM tech support engineers, forum moderators, and field specialists; the people who step in during high-severity system outages.
IT Generalists
encountered dense metrics and unfamiliar terminology without enough context to understand what required attention. Painpoint: Understanding the cluster required more technical knowledge than the dashboard should demand
Power Users
needed more comprehensive monitoring information and often switched between the dashboard, CLI tools, and custom Grafana or Prometheus setups. Painpoint: Getting a complete view of the system often meant leaving the dashboard and piecing information together from different tools.
“Diagnostics are limited through UI so need to use CLI for more advanced functions, which may not be available through the UI”
A.S. (S01) Sr. Infrastructure Engineer, NetApp
Data without context
The dashboard exposed detailed cluster information, but users still had to interpret what the numbers and statuses meant for the overall health of their storage environment.
Fragmented health signals
Warnings and incidents came from different areas, making it hard to assess overall cluster condition and prioritize critical issues.
Disconnected monitoring tools
Administrators relied on CLI commands and external tools for a complete view, preventing the dashboard from being their go-to starting point.
Approach
Research insights led to a common design direction: make the overview easier to understand, keep related information together, and provide access to deeper detail when it was needed.
Design Ideation
Collaborative strategy
Before sketching solutions, I gathered Product Management, Engineering, and Support teams for a alignment workshop. This anchored the team around core user needs before anyone proposed technical fixes. We structured our design direction using the Whys and Hows Framework to map user realities directly to product execution.
Heuristic evaluation & portfolio benchmarking
I conducted a comprehensive heuristic audit of the legacy product. Because the interface had been built organically by engineering teams, this audit served a dual purpose: it exposed critical UX gaps and created a technical blueprint for the IBM Carbon Design System migration.
To ensure consistency across the enterprise, we benchmarked our layouts against established, high-performing storage dashboards within the IBM portfolio, adopting proven UX patterns for the Storage Administrator persona.
Design principles
Simplified health signals
Establish a clearer hierarchy between overall cluster health, alerts, incidents, and component status.
Actionable resource metrics
Bring storage consumption, trends, capacity projections, and performance metrics into a more coherent overview.
Frictionless deep dives
Use progressive disclosure and consistent interaction patterns to help users move from a summary to the details relevant to their task.
Adopting IBM Carbon
Establish consistency with the wider IBM product ecosystem while providing a foundation for reusable patterns. Use a consistent design language to make a technically complex experience more predictable and easier to navigate.
The intent was not to eliminate technical complexity. It was to organize that complexity so users could understand the overall system first and investigate further when necessary.
Solution
Bringing the experience together
The redesigned dashboard brings the three main monitoring questions into a more coherent experience:
Health: Understand the state of the cluster and identify issues that need attention.
Capacity: Understand current storage consumption, trends, and potential constraints.
Performance: Monitor service-level metrics and component status without having to assemble the entire picture from disconnected views.
From scattered status signals to a clearer picture of health
Separated cluster health incidents from system alerts into a dedicated side panel. Refactored PGs information into Data resiliency to communicate data health which further categorizes placement-group states for a high-level summary.
Why this approach: Establishes a clear hierarchy so users answer "Is something wrong?" before diving into "What needs investigation?"
From raw storage figures to capacity awareness
Consolidated consumption, trends, savings, and estimates while organizing metrics by Block, File, and Object services.
Challenge: A usage figure tells administrators how much storage is consumed at a particular moment, but it doesn't explain how consumption is changing or when capacity could become a concern. The capacity card lacks actionable insights. Users can see capacity but may not know what actions to take, potentially leading to mismanagement or delays in addressing issues.
Why this approach: Combines current usage with future direction so admins can forecast capacity without navigating multiple views.
From fragmented monitoring to a more complete overview
I organized the overview to bring together the most useful monitoring signals while retaining access to more detailed information. I used information hierarchy to distinguish the overall state of the cluster from service-level performance and component details.
The dashboard also includes upgrade notifications and clearer component and hardware status information, helping administrators monitor their environment from a more consistent starting point.
Separated cluster health incidents from system alerts into a dedicated side panel.
Inconsistent UI patterns diverged from IBM standards
Applying IBM Carbon Design system - Transforming fragmented interactions into a cohesive IBM experience.
An actionable empty state with clear guidance and calls to action to help first-time users navigate the dashboard.
Result
From a dashboard that exposed technical information to one designed to help administrators interpret the system and decide where to look next.
User Validation & Impact
We validated the redesigned dashboard live at the Ceph Days India Event (March 2026), collecting direct feedback from active enterprise clients and community users.
I used informal, guerrilla-style testing to understand their reactions to the proposed dashboard and how they interpreted the redesigned experience. I treated the feedback as directional input to help assess the design and identify areas that might need further consideration.
User feedback. Admins verified that the new layout eliminated the need to jump between external Grafana dashboards and CLI tools for routine status checks.
What I learned
Designing for infrastructure products isn't about hiding complexity. It's about making complexity understandable without removing the depth that experienced users depend on.
The most consequential decisions weren't about adding more information. They were about deciding what deserved attention first, how related signals should be grouped, and how users could move from an overview to the detail needed to investigate a problem.
That became the central principle behind the redesign: make the system easier to understand before asking users to manage it.
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