By Ulrike Fempel (SAP Open Source Program Office) and Akshay Iyyadurai Balasundaram (Developer at SAP and Perses maintainer).

Akshay is a maintainer of Perses since May 2025. I'll let him take it from here.

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OpenTelemetry is a CNCF graduated project and an open standard for telemetry. This framework is widely used for collecting metrics, logs, and traces in cloud-native environments. However, there is no equivalent standardized tooling for visualizing that data.

This is a significant challenge at scale. Each dashboard a team builds in a proprietary tool deepens their dependence on that vendor's ecosystem, making migration to alternatives increasingly difficult and costly. A standardized, open-source tool could solve this vendor lock-in problem.

That's where Perses comes in: an open, Kubernetes-native dashboarding tool designed specifically for monitoring and observability workflows. At SAP, we're committed to contributing upstream and collaborating with the broader community to advance this effort.

What is Perses?

Open sourced in 2022 by Amadeus, Perses is a CNCF project, licensed under Apache 2.0. Its cloud-native design allows for modern observability and monitoring dashboards in cloud infrastructures.

The goal of Perses is to provide a unified place to view metrics, logs, and traces instead of jumping between different tools, bringing them together into a single dashboard. In short, Perses aims to be the “single pane of glass” for any kind of observability data.

Key features

• Plugin-based architecture: Perses is built on a plugin system that lets you visualize data from any source, such as Prometheus, Jaeger, Splunk, and more. You can mix and match data sources within the same dashboard, and if the data source you need doesn't exist yet, you can build your own plugin for it.
• CLI tool: Perses CLI (percli) is a powerful command-line tool that lets you interact with Perses without using the UI. You can create and update dashboards, manage data sources, and much more, making it easy to automate dashboard management in CI pipelines or GitOps workflows.
• Embeddable React components: You can embed Perses panels and dashboards directly into your own applications and portals.
• Dashboard-as-Code: Define dashboards in Go or CUE, version them in Git, and deploy them with percli or the Perses Kubernetes Operator.
• Perses MCP Server: The MCP server enables you to create and update Perses resources, such as dashboards, with the assistance of an AI agent.

Why did SAP start contributing?

Our work on Perses is primarily backed by SAP's participation in ApeiroRA (Apeiro Reference Architecture), which represents SAP's contribution to IPCEI-CIS. This EU initiative, co-funded by the European Union, aims to build an open, multi-provider cloud-edge stack that European businesses can run without depending on a single vendor. Its goal is to strengthen open-source building blocks for cloud and edge infrastructure in Europe—and dashboarding is one of those essential building blocks.

This ties directly into the sovereign cloud narrative. If the objective is to give organizations a stack they fully control, every layer of that stack must be open, including the one used to visualize observability data.

That's why collaborating with Perses is relevant for SAP and other organizations. It provides an open visualization layer that any organization -whether in Europe or elsewhere – can easily adopt without worrying about vendor lock-in.

The open source approach benefits many teams at SAP. Anyone at SAP can contribute new features and bug fixes upstream – when something is missing or broken, the affected team can simply submit a fix. In contrast, dependence on third-party vendors often results in long delays for feature requests and bug reports.

At SAP Cloud Infrastructure, we encourage the teams using Perses to contribute their changes upstream. This model has worked really well, and it scales naturally as more teams adopt Perses.

From contributor to maintainer

SAP now contributes to Perses alongside Amadeus and Red Hat, helping the project grow. We are also officially listed on the Perses’ adopters list, joining a growing group of companies that are betting on an open standard for dashboards.

Working closely with the Perses community has been essential to making the project production-ready for SAP. Through contributing features, fixing bugs, driving design decisions, and joining the weekly community calls, I became a Perses maintainer in May 2025. To date, I have around 100 merged pull requests across the repositories in the Perses GitHub organization.

Highlights from my personal journey with Perses:

• In 2025, I designed and built the Perses MCP Server from scratch (read more).
• Introduced a keyboard shortcut framework that allows users to navigate the Perses application without leaving the keyboard.
• Enhanced the automated migration tooling so that teams can easily switch to Perses.
• Took ownership of the Helm chart, enabling Perses to be bundled and easily consumed in Kubernetes environments.

How to get involved?

You don't need to build a complex new feature to get involved. Anyone can start small—even by fixing a piece of documentation. That's how I started!

Beyond technical work, contributing to Perses offers the opportunity to collaborate with people from all over the world. The community is very welcoming to newcomers, and there are several great ways to connect and get involved:

• Slack: Join the conversation in the #perses-dev channel on the CNCF Slack workspace. This is the best place for general questions, help with your first pull request, or simply chatting with other users.
• GitHub Discussions: For broader topics, proposing ideas, or asynchronous Q&A, open a discussion in the Perses GitHub repository.
• Weekly Team Meetings: The community holds public team meetings every Monday from 3:30 PM to 4:00 PM UTC. Feel free to drop in if you have a specific topic to raise, or if you just want to listen in on what the core team is discussing.
• LinkedIn: Follow the project on LinkedIn to stay updated on the latest releases and announcements.

For more context and links to these channels, check out the official Perses Contact page. We look forward to seeing you in the community!

Join upcoming Webinar about Perses

To learn more, join our upcoming webinar with the creator of Perses, Augustin Husson (Lead Principal Engineer at Amadeus) and me, hosted by the SAP Open Source Program Office on September 1st (link to registration).