The Problem with Click-Ops Dashboards

Your team has 200 dashboards. You don't know who owns them. Half are broken. The rest show yesterday's reality.

This is click-ops debt, and it compounds faster than code debt.

Observability as Code

Every dashboard, alert, and SLO definition should live in a Git repository alongside your service code.

resource "datadog_dashboard" "api_gateway" { title = "API Gateway - Golden Signals" description = "Owner: @platform-team" layout_type = "ordered"

widget { timeseries_definition { title = "Request Rate (per second)" request { q = "sum:api.requests{service:gateway}.as_rate()" } } }

widget { timeseries_definition { title = "P99 Latency" request { q = "max:api.latency{service:gateway}.as_count()" } } } }

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This lives next to main.tf for your service. When you deploy the service, you deploy the observability.

Benefits That Compound

1. Ownership is clear. The file has a CODEOWNERS entry. PRs require review.

2.…