Implementing monitoring of key metrics is a requirement for establishing SLOs. A dashboard may not be observed constantly, and if you have an incident, those ke

Implementing monitoring of key metrics is a requirement for establishing SLOs. A dashboard may not be observed constantly, and if you have an incident, those key metrics better be presented in a manner that shows realtime, and historic performance. Prometheus and Grafana are prevalent because they are robust and mature implementations. You are correct that dashboards more often than not are to showoff this capability, and remember I said that you MUST implement monitoring if you have SLOs. Think of the Dashboard as a Cherry on the cake. There isn't much point to the Cherry, but if you bought a cake you better get a cake! My biggest complaint for dashboarding is that it is easy to ignore some key components, such as nth percentile beyond 95 which is mostly a capacity planning target. If you go looking you will find that there are serious issues in serving your 96-99th percentiles. If you are looking for something to improve start there.