Observability Tool Perses Becomes CNCF Project
Perses, an open-source dashboard and visualization tool, has been accepted as a Cloud Native Computing Foundation (CNCF) project. The move validates Perses as a credible, modern alternative to commercial monitoring stacks for visualizing data from sources like Prometheus and Jaeger, offering a cost-effective option for SRE teams.
Perses originated as an internal project at the travel tech company Amadeus to manage its 5,000+ Grafana dashboards. Upgrading Grafana would frequently break dashboards due to schema changes, prompting principal engineer Augustin Husson to create a new tool with a stable data model designed for a "dashboard-as-code" workflow. The project's key differentiator is its GitOps-first approach, treating dashboard configurations as code. This allows teams to store, version, and validate dashboards in a CI/CD pipeline using the Perses CLI, a process that is notoriously difficult with Grafana's UI-driven, JSON-based model. Acceptance into the CNCF Sandbox on August 29, 2024, is the first step for early-stage projects, validating Perses' potential to fill a gap in the CNCF's observability tooling landscape. The foundation hosts graduated projects like Kubernetes and Prometheus but previously lacked a dedicated, vendor-neutral visualization tool. Perses is built to be Kubernetes-native, with a roadmap that includes a Perses Operator to manage dashboards as Custom Resource Definitions (CRDs). This allows dashboard definitions to be deployed and managed within an application's namespace, alongside the application itself. The tool is designed for extensibility and interoperability, offering npm packages to embed charts into other applications, a feature used by Red Hat OpenShift. It currently supports data sources like Prometheus, Tempo, Loki, and Pyroscope, unifying metrics, traces, logs, and profiling in a single view. Licensed under the more permissive Apache 2.0, Perses contrasts with Grafana's AGPL v3 license. Its roadmap focuses on expanding data source support, including OpenSearch and ClickHouse, and achieving its goal of becoming a community-driven standard for observability visualization.
