naxos-docs/docs/architecture/perses-analytics.md

Integrated Real-Time Telemetry & Metrics Architecture

Seamless In-App Telemetry vs. Standalone Grafana

Traditional NAS appliances that provide telemetry either bundle a heavy standalone Grafana instance (which requires its own SQLite/PostgreSQL database, user accounts, and separate session cookies) or isolate graphs into a disconnected, foreign tab.

NaxOS takes a pioneering approach by integrating Perses (a Cloud Native Computing Foundation project) as the underlying declarative telemetry engine, weaving real-time metrics directly into the core appliance dashboard and storage views:

1. GitOps & Declarative Native:
   • Perses dashboards and datasources are written in clean declarative JSON/CUE manifests.
   • Dashboards are checked into /var/lib/perses/projects/naxos/dashboards as code.
2. Embedded Direct Visualization:
   • The NaxOS Web Dashboard seamlessly communicates with the internal Perses metrics API.
   • Eliminates Grafana's multi-megabyte bundle overhead, auth barriers, and database schema migrations.
   • Telemetry widgets live naturally alongside storage pool management, active workloads, and system status.
3. Optimized for OpenZFS Metrics:
   • Out-of-the-box panels monitor OpenZFS ARC hits, misses, ARC target sizing, IOPS, and disk latencies scraped from Prometheus and Node Exporter.