• Backup in case if someone accidentally deletes dashboard and ability to recreate it with single command
• Ability to keep dashboards in git repo, make modifications using text editor, suggest Pull Requests
• YAML format providing simpler way to describe dashboards without repeating a lot of things in chatty JSON. Example: https://github.com/xeron/datadog-sync/blob/master/examples/dashboard_example.yml
• Automation purposes (for example creating new dashboard or adding graphs when you deploy new version of application)