As your Lightbits deployment grows, so does the body of documentation that supports it – and we’ve heard from customers that finding the right page at the right moment isn’t always obvious. The information is all there, but it lives across several dedicated spaces, each built for a different job.
This post is your map. Rather than bookmarking one page and hoping it links to everything else, use the guide below to go straight to what you need – whether you’re standing up a new cluster, tuning performance, or checking a release note ahead of a major upgrade.
Everything here is focused on Lightbits Private Cloud deployments.
The documentation at a glance
Here’s how it all fits together. Everything starts at the portal and branches into focused areas – the Private Cloud library is your core, with the reference guides, release notes, support, and deeper learning resources supporting it.
Start here: the documentation portal
documentation.lightbitslabs.com is the front door to everything. If you only remember one address, make it this one – every guide, reference, and release note described below branches out from here, and the site search will get you to most answers in a couple of clicks.
The portal also has a built-in documentation assistant – a doc bot you can simply ask in plain language. Instead of guessing which guide holds the answer, type your question and it will point you to the right page or summarize what you need. It’s often the fastest way in, especially when you’re not yet sure where a topic lives. The full API reference is also available on this portal, making it the natural starting point when you’re integrating Lightbits with your own tooling and automation.
The core: Lightbits Private Cloud documentation
Lightbits Private Cloud documentation is where Private Cloud teams will spend most of their time. This is the complete, end-to-end library for running Lightbits in your own data center, and the guides here walk you through the entire lifecycle:
- Planning and installation: hardware and network prerequisites, sizing guidance, and step-by-step deployment, including the Ansible-based install flow.
- Cluster administration: managing nodes, provisioning and managing volumes, configuring replication and protection, and handling everyday operational tasks.
- Upgrades and maintenance: moving safely between releases and keeping clusters healthy over time.
- Monitoring and troubleshooting: understanding cluster behavior and diagnosing issues as they arise.
Make this section your home base.
Don’t skip: Operational Best Practices
Within the Lightbits Private Cloud library, one section earns a callout of its own: Operational Best Practices.
This is the distilled, field-tested guidance that helps you get the most out of your cluster – the configuration choices, operational habits, and tuning recommendations that separate a cluster that simply runs from one that runs well. If you’re deploying for the first time, read it before you go live. If you’re already in production, it’s worth a periodic revisit – especially ahead of capacity expansions or high-traffic events.
Your everyday reference shelf
A few focused references cover the tools you’ll reach for day to day:
- CLI Reference Guide – the complete command-line reference for managing and inspecting your cluster. Keep it open in a tab.
- Plugins Guide – everything on integrating Lightbits with your orchestration stack, including Kubernetes/CSI and other platform plugins, so your storage maps cleanly into both containerized and virtualized environments.
- Metrics and Events – the catalog of metrics and events Lightbits exposes, essential for building dashboards, configuring alerting, and feeding your monitoring pipeline.
Stay current: release notes and known issues
Before every upgrade, check the Release Documentation. This is where new releases, changelogs, and known issues are published – and it’s often the difference between a smooth upgrade and an avoidable surprise. Building a quick “read the release notes” step into your upgrade routine is one of the easiest ways to keep maintenance windows predictable.
When you need a hand: support documentation
The Support documentation explains how to work with Lightbits Customer Success – how to open and escalate tickets, what information to gather, and how to get the fastest path to resolution when something needs attention. Knowing this section ahead of time means you’re never figuring out the process in the middle of an incident.
Go deeper: blogs, white papers, and resources
Once you’re comfortable with the operational docs, our technical blog and resources library are where we share the “why” behind the product – architecture deep-dives, performance tuning, benchmarking results, and white papers that help you design better and optimize harder. These are ideal for engineers who want to understand Lightbits beyond its operational mechanics and get the most performance from their deployments.
Prefer to watch rather than read? Our YouTube channel hosts demos, walkthroughs, and technical talks that bring many of these concepts to life – a handy companion to the written docs, and a good way to get up to speed quickly.
A living resource
Our documentation team is continuously expanding what’s available online. In particular, we’re actively adding more troubleshooting and diagnostic guides to the official documentation, so you can resolve more issues on your own, faster.
Documentation is only valuable if it’s easy to find and easy to read, and that’s a standard we hold ourselves to. If there’s something you can’t locate, or a guide you wish existed, let your account team know – that feedback goes straight into what we build next.
Bookmark the portal, keep this map close, and you’ll always know where to look.
Need help now? Contact the Lightbits Support team.