Perses: Open, GitOps-Friendly Observability Dashboards
Shriira Press
An open, GitOps-friendly dashboard tool for observability — dashboards as code, a defined data model, a CLI and API, embeddable panels, and a Kubernetes-native way to manage it all.
Welcome to Perses: Open, GitOps-Friendly Observability Dashboards.
Perses is the CNCF sandbox project that treats observability dashboards as a first-class, open standard rather than a pile of clickable JSON locked inside one tool. It gives you a defined data model for dashboards, a server with a REST API and a web UI, a command-line tool called percli for CI/CD pipelines, two dashboards-as-code SDKs in Go and CUE, embeddable React packages so you can drop Perses panels into your own application, and a Kubernetes operator that turns dashboards and datasources into ordinary custom resources you can reconcile with GitOps. This free book teaches Perses from the ground up: the dashboard sprawl problem and what Perses is, the Kubernetes-inspired data model, the dashboard spec in detail with panels, queries, layouts and variables, the plugin system and the datasources it supports, dashboards as code, the CLI and Grafana migration, the operator and Kubernetes-native workflows, authentication and RBAC, embedding panels in your own UI, and a closing chapter on adopting Perses in practice. Clear prose and concrete examples make a sometimes abstract idea — a portable, version-controlled dashboard standard — feel tangible.
This title is part of the ShriIra library and is free to read in full, right here — our small contribution to making world-class knowledge easy to reach.
A note on reading it: open the Contents menu at the top of the reader to jump between chapters, use the Aa menu to set a comfortable text size, theme (light, sepia, or night), and single- or two-page layout. Your place is saved automatically, so you can always pick up where you left off.
We hope it serves you well.
— Shriira Press