Project Lightning Talk: Perses General Overview - Augustin Husson, Maintainer

by Augustin Husson

Day 2 · Elicium 2 · Project Lightning Talk · 5 min · 3 min read

Observability Infrastructure as Code

TL;DR

Augustin Husson presents Perses, a CNCF sandbox observability visualization tool that displays metrics, logs, traces, and profiling data. The project ships SDKs in CUE and Go, a CLI for CI/CD dashboard validation, and a Kubernetes operator for deployment. Perses hit 2,000 GitHub stars in 2025, added 20 new contributors in three months, and is funded by the European Union.

What Perses Displays and How It Extends

▶ Watch (0:18)

Perses is a CNCF sandbox project that handles metrics, logs, traces, and profiling from a single tool. The team is adding data sources beyond the current set, including Polar Signals for profiling and OpenSearch for logs. The dashboard and data source specifications ship in TypeScript, Go, and CUE. Java support is planned but not yet published. Plugins extend the spec, and per-company validation rules let teams enforce their own governance standards.

Embedding Components Without Running the Full Application

▶ Watch (1:21)

Teams that do not want a standalone monitoring application can embed Perses React components directly. A time series chart, for example, drops into any existing React frontend. The Perses binary also runs locally so engineers can preview dashboard changes in real time before pushing to production. Husson described the setup as straightforward: download the binary, run it, done. No additional infrastructure is required for local development.

GitOps Workflow: CLI, Operator, and Dashboard as Code

▶ Watch (1:43)

Perses ships a CLI that validates dashboards inside a CI/CD pipeline. A Kubernetes operator deploys Perses and can push dashboards directly into a namespace once a PR merges. The dashboard-as-code SDK lets engineers write Go that produces YAML or JSON, which the CLI then validates. Preview generation works against remote instances when the CI/CD has access. This full workflow currently runs on GitHub Actions only. Husson invited contributors to request support for other CI/CD systems.

Community Growth and Funding

▶ Watch (3:14)

Perses crossed 2,000 GitHub stars earlier in 2025. The last release had 27 contributors, and 20 new contributors joined in the three months before the talk. Active development comes from Amadeus, Red Hat, and ASAP. The European Union funded the project in 2024 and renewed that funding for 2025. Husson said he was glad to see the EU backing continue. The project can be reached at perses.dev, on LinkedIn, X, and Slack.

Notable Quotes

Perses is a CNCF sandbox project. Augustin Husson · ▶ 00:18

You can customize the validation of your dashboard to implement your own rules according to your governance of your company. Augustin Husson · ▶ 01:12

Perses reached 2,000 stars earlier this year. We have 20 new contributors in the last 3 months. Augustin Husson · ▶ 03:16

Key Takeaways

Perses covers metrics, logs, traces, and profiling in one CNCF sandbox tool.
The CLI validates dashboards in CI/CD; the Kubernetes operator deploys them to namespaces.
27 contributors shipped the last release; the EU funds ongoing development.

About the Speaker(s)

Augustin Husson is a Principal Engineer at Amadeus and a Prometheus maintainer. His current focus is sharing UI components across the Prometheus ecosystem and building Perses, an open source project aimed at becoming a GitOps-friendly observability standard.

Filed under

Observability Infrastructure as Code