As OCP (and OSSM) no longer supports Grafana for dashboards, OSSM no longer provides support for Istio's Grafana dashboards. This represents a gap in our offering, and potentially makes it more difficult to onboard with OSSM for metrics. While Kiali provides a light per service metrics view, users often want to combine OSSM's metrics with their dashboards other apps and infrastructure - including metrics not reported by Istio.

[Perses|https://perses.dev/,] a CNCF sandbox project that aims to provide an open standard for greating dashboards, is OCP's Grafana replacement, and we should ensure that OSSM integrates well with it. One notable feature Perses includes that Grafana did not is the ability to scope dashboards to a namespace. 

Contact for Perses: Vanessa Martini

Perses is deployed and managed by the Cluster Observability Operator (COO), which is an optional component for managing monitoring stacks on OpenShift that is independent of the default OpenShift user workload monitoring. To date, 

Migrating from Grafana to Perses: https://docs.google.com/document/d/1nx7maN5YM6HSU1rM31awuN_62Fy_AEz2ZKEDRpgRwNM/edit?usp=sharing

This is a broad epic that will require further scoping to enumerate work items, and may even need to be split up. It will require some engineering analysis before it can be planned.

Potential work items:

• Convert Istio's Grafana dashboards to Perses (Perses has a CLI tool to facilitate this) and contribute them to the Istio community as a Grafana alternative. This may include creating a Perses quickstart (similar to Grafana). As Perses is a CNCF project(unlike Grafana), it seems like Istio should be open to this.
• Introduce support for Perses into Kiali as an equal alternative to Grafana.
• Introduce support for the Cluster Observability Operator with OSSM, which will include Perses dashboards for Istio. This may be an epic on its own, as this will be an alternative metrics setup vs user workload monitoring.