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

CNCF Perses Native Analytics Architecture

Why Perses over 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 write rudimentary, un-configurable charts into their dashboard.

NaxOS takes a pioneering approach by integrating Perses (a Cloud Native Computing Foundation project):

1. GitOps & Declarative Native:
   • Perses dashboards and datasources are written in clean JSON/CUE manifests.
   • Dashboards are checked into /var/lib/perses/projects/naxos/dashboards as code.
2. Embedded Direct Visualization:
   • The NaxOS Web Dashboard communicates with the internal Perses metrics API.
   • Eliminates Grafana's multi-megabyte bundle overhead, auth barriers, and database schema migrations.
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.