[seanlaff]

Agreed, watching dashboards is no substitute for alerting. However, one of the motivators for doing this is to reduce pressure on the metric backend. It's common to have Grafana reports refresh at 5s intervals, which if you have sub-second data, means that you request the same (potentially tens of thousands of) points over and over again. Some have worked around this by adding a caching layer (see https://github.com/Comcast/trickster), but streaming feels more elegant :)

[rixed]

Exactly this. Especially in an environment where you have tens or hundredths of people/screens with the dashboard opened.

Non streaming dashboards are just stupidly hammering the backends (and the network transferring the same data over and over). So this has nothing to do with how cool it looks (also dashboard users rarely complain that they refresh or scroll too fast).

Working on such a backend at the moment, I was missing this feature so much I would probably have started to work on this on my own at some point.