Like lots of operations people, we’re quite addicted to data pr0n here at Flickr. We’ve got graphs for pretty much everything, and add graphs all of the time. We’ve blogged about some of how and why we do it.

One thing we’re in the habit of is screenshotting these graphs when things go wrong, right, or indifferent, and adding them to a group on Flickr.

I’ve decided to make a public group for these sort of screenshots, for anyone to contribute to:

http://flickr.com/groups/webopsviz/

You should realize before posting anything here, that you might want to think about if you want everyone in the world to see what you’ve got. I’ve made a quick FAQ on the groups page, but I’ll repeat it here:

Q: What is this?
A: This group is for sharing visualizations of web operations metrics. For the most part, this means graphs of systems and application metrics, from software like ganglia, cacti, hyperic, etc.

Q:Who gets to see this?
A: This is a semi-public group, so don’t post anything you don’t want others to see.

For now, it’ll be for members-only to post and view. Ideally, I think it’d be great to share some of these things publicly.

Q: What’s interesting to post here?
A: Spikes, dips, patterns. Things with colors. Shiny things. Donuts. Ponies.

Q: My company will fire me if I show our metrics!
A: Don’t be dense, and post your pageview, revenue, or other super-secret stuff that you think would be sensitive. Your mileage may vary.

So: you’ve got something to brag about? How many requests per second can your awesome new solid-state-disk database do? You got spikes? Post them!