6.1. How to deploy a live ML monitoring dashboard

ML monitoring architectures recap and how to deploy a live ML monitoring dashboard.

Video 1. How to deploy a live ML monitoring dashboard, by Emeli Dral

Why build a monitoring dashboard?

Tests and reports are great for running structured checks and exploring and debugging your data and ML models. However, when you run tests or build an ad-hoc report, you evaluate only a specific batch of data. This makes your monitoring “static”: you can get alerts but have no visibility into metric evolution and trends.

That is where the ML monitoring dashboard comes into play, as it:

• Tracks metrics over time,

• Aids in trend analysis and provides insights,

• Provides a shared UI to enhance visibility for stakeholders, e.g., data scientists, model users, product managers, business stakeholders, etc.

ML monitoring architectures recap

Before proceeding to the code practice of building a monitoring dashboard, let’s quickly recap ML monitoring architectures and how they differ.

ML monitoring starts with logging. To set up an effective ML monitoring backend for your service, you need to log input data, model outputs, and labeled data (if available) – they can be recorded in a prediction store.

You can send logged data to an ML monitoring service or run monitoring jobs to calculate monitoring metrics. Both methods allow recording calculated metrics in a metric store, which you can use as a data source to build a monitoring dashboard.

Code practice overview

We will show how to design and deploy an ML monitoring dashboard for batch and near real-time model monitoring architectures.

For batch monitoring, we will use Evidently open-source ML monitoring architecture. We will:

• Create snapshots that are individual Reports or Test Suites computed for a specific period (e.g., hour, day, week) in a rich JSON format.

• Log them to a file system and run an ML monitoring service that reads data from snapshots.

• Design dashboard panels and visualize data and model metrics over time. You can easily switch between time-series data and individual Reports/Test Suites for further analysis and debugging.

For near real-time monitoring, Evidently provides a collector service:

• It collects incoming data and computes Reports / Test Suites continuously.

• You can configure the service to calculate snapshots over various time intervals (as opposed to writing batch jobs on your own – you can define the frequency of batches using a config file).

• The service outputs the same snapshots as in the batch monitoring scheme: the front-end is the same.

We will also cover an alternative architecture using Grafana, a popular open-source visualization tool. We will walk you through the Evidently and Grafana integration example – you can parse data computed by Evidently, store it in a chosen database, and visualize it in Grafana. In this case, Evidently serves as an evaluation layer.

This can be a good alternative if you already use Grafana for monitoring and alerting for other services.

And now, to practice!