We deleted 34 dashboards and nobody complained

We had 61 dashboards. Our BI tool reports view counts, so we pulled ninety days of them.

Twenty-two had not been opened at all. Twelve more had been opened only by the person who built them. Six were opened weekly by one person each. The remaining twenty-one carried essentially all the usage.

We announced a deprecation window: anything in the first two groups would be renamed deprecated_ for two weeks and then deleted, and anyone could opt a dashboard out by saying so in a channel.

Four opt-outs. We deleted 34.

Nobody complained, before or after. What we got back:

• Roughly a day a week of maintenance that had been going into models feeding nothing.
• A warehouse bill down about 11%, because dead dashboards still refresh on schedule.
• A dashboard list a new person can actually read.

The deprecated_ rename is the part I would keep in any version of this. It breaks anything that depends on the object visibly and recoverably, which is much better than a delete that breaks something silently a month later.

The thing I did not expect: three of the surviving dashboards got noticeably better within a month, because the people maintaining them suddenly had time. Deleting things is not just cleanup. It is how the remaining work gets attention.