In recent years, “the biggest needs we’ve heard from our customers have been to make it easier to understand their observability data, to extend observability into the application layer, and to get deeper, contextualized analytics,” said Tom Wilkie, CTO of Grafana Labs, at ObservabilityCON 2023.

In discussions across the tech and data communities in recent years, a provocative idea has been gaining traction: the notion that dashboards are dead. The first time I came across this was in the article by Taylor Brownlow of the same name, "Dashboards are Dead". A worthwhile read. The article suggests that dashboards, as we known them, no longer serve the needs of modern data-driven organizations. Not through their own fault as such, more through misuse or over-asking.

Enhancing security and providing flexible access control has always been part of our core mission at Grafana. In line with those efforts, we made service accounts generally available in Grafana 9.1. Service accounts are essentially machines simulating Grafana users, and they are used to run automated workloads — for example, counting the number of data sources in Grafana every day or provisioning alerts using Terraform.