We are getting used to divide our time into years, months, weeks etc. This dictates many aspects of our life. We accept it without questioning and just go along with it.

Among all the date scales, month is kind of particular. It is not related to any natural/astronomical phenomenon, neither to moon activity nor to woman's menstrual cycle. Although initially named after the moon, it evolved to be irrelevant. Lunar calendar (still used in China and many parts of the world) is a much better representation of the moon periodicity.

Nowadays, month has taken a monstrous importance in the life of humanity because it dictates our financial life. Anything that has to do with money, is in monthly installment: salary, rent, mortgage, alimony... We become accustomed to everything monthly since money is such a crucial factor. (Update: my current employer just decided to pay us bi-weekly starting 2015! It makes accounting so much easier.)

It so happened that some of our operation monitoring dashboards are dictated by monthly views. It doesn't have to be so. Not for everything. For data center activity monitoring purposes, it really doesn't have to be so. Internet activities are not really showing any sign of monthly periodicity. A rolling multi-weekly calendar is much more interesting.

For example, a monthly view may show only 1 day worth of data in the beginning of the month, or a few more days, leaving the rest of the month blank. Instead, a rolling 5-week calendar consistently shows 30-day-ish worth of data. It just takes as much space on your report canvas. It is a better use of the screen real estate. Initially, I thought a 5-week view would suffice to cover a regular month. Later, I realized that a month may span over 6 weeks. So, I decided to use a rolling 6-weekly calendar to replace the monthly calendar in my report view.


Monthly Calendar