Dashboards are a visualization and interactive tool and like any tool have better and worse uses.
While the OP hits lots of points squarely, I strongly disagree about the "no one needs real time". In particular, any service that does onboarding or signups would be really well served to track new users through the getting started process.
I live in the custom dashboard that I built for my startup.
It tracks every single signup from provisioning through to successful setup. It lets me easily see if people are flailing trying to get things working and if it looks like they are I send them a personal email like: "It looks like you might be having some issues with picking an email approver address, can I help?"
Having this real-time insight into customer issues lets me provide much better support and from an ROI basis is incredibly worthwhile.
While the OP hits lots of points squarely, I strongly disagree about the "no one needs real time". In particular, any service that does onboarding or signups would be really well served to track new users through the getting started process.
I live in the custom dashboard that I built for my startup.
Screenshot: https://www.evernote.com/shard/s16/sh/c8cdeadc-643d-4028-b58...
It tracks every single signup from provisioning through to successful setup. It lets me easily see if people are flailing trying to get things working and if it looks like they are I send them a personal email like: "It looks like you might be having some issues with picking an email approver address, can I help?"
Having this real-time insight into customer issues lets me provide much better support and from an ROI basis is incredibly worthwhile.
The actual service: https://addons.herokuapp.com/expeditedssl