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2025#

Introducing the Perses MCP Server

We're thrilled to introduce the Perses MCP Server, now available in public beta. This new tool empowers you to interact with your Perses instances using natural language, opening up a world of possibilities for monitoring and visualization.

With the Perses MCP Server, users can use AI Agents to understand, query and interact with Perses APIs in a standardized and secure manner.

Imagine being able to prompt your favorite AI Agent with questions like:

  • "How many dashboards are created in the last 5 days in project 'Test Project'?"
  • "What is the default datasource for project 'Test Project'?"
    • "Is this datasource in proxy mode? and what is the URL?"
  • "Analyze this dashboard 'Dashboard A' in project 'Test Project'"
    • Suggest me some improvements to panels and PromQL queries in this dashboard

As you can see, the possibilities are endless. The Perses MCP Server allows you to interact with Perses in ways that were previously not possible.

Composable Dashboards - Lessons from building Perses Community Dashboards

Why we keep rewriting the same dashboards

Every CNCF User/Developer/Contributor has, at some point, to endure the frustration of trying to salvage an outdated dashboard, or adapting upstream YAML, only to get to the point of wondering why it doesn't work on their setup. This leads to a recurring pattern: everyone ends up rebuilding the same dashboards, over and over again, each slightly different.

The Mixins Dashboards helped bring about a sense of relief, as users now could use dashboards and alerts packaged together with the code they are deployed with. In theory, this promised consistency and easier integration. In practical terms, as the concept of mixins relies on Jsonnet, and even though it’s a suitable language for configuration management, it leads to a few issues:

  • Jsonnet has a steep learning curve. It’s not a conventional Turing-complete programming language, and often makes it hard for downstream users of mixins to be able to do any sort of customization on their dashboards;

  • Mixin Jsonnet is completely detached from the actual application code. It was introduced as a way to maintain dashboarding config for code that you are deploying side by side, to ensure it never goes out of sync. However, many mixins are rarely updated, even when the code is - sometimes these are maintained out of the tree. And Jsonnet cannot use Go structs, so there is no automatic validation during code changes. Thus keeping mixins accurate and reliable demands a lot of effort.;

  • Adoption has also been uneven. A good example of this is kube-prometheus stack, built with Jsonnet, where many users bypass it entirely and only fetch the rendered YAML from that repository, then doing any sort of changes with tools like Kustomize instead. This undermines the original goal of reuse and standardization.

The end result is, that despite the promise of reusable dashboards, the reality is there’s still not a widely used solution for automatic dashboards creation.

  • in release
  • 10 min read

Release v0.51.0

We are excited to announce the release of Perses v0.51.0!

This release brings several new features, improvements, and bug fixes to enhance your experience with Perses.

It is a significant step forward in the evolution of Perses, and we are thrilled to share it with you. We have been working hard to bring you a more powerful and flexible platform for your observability needs.

This release includes a new plugin architecture, new panel, new variable, a new repository perses/plugins containing all default plugins supported by Perses.

We have also made significant improvements to the documentation, highlighting features that were implemented some time ago but not well advertised, such as datasource discovery and ephemeral dashboards.

  • in release
  • 4 min read

Release v0.50.0

We are excited to announce the release of Perses v0.50.0! This release brings significant improvements to the migration process from Grafana to Perses, including a major fix for a memory leak issue. Additionally, it introduces a new Status History Panel and various enhancements to the Table Panel, UI, and CLI. Read on to learn more about the new features and improvements in this release.

See the complete release note for more details: v0.50.0