Documentation Grafana Agent Stability

Stability

Stability of functionality usually refers to the stability of a use case, such as collecting and forwarding OpenTelemetry metrics.

Features within the Grafana Agent project will fall into one of three stability categories:

• Experimental: A new use case is being explored.
• Beta: Functionality covering a use case is being matured.
• Stable: Functionality covering a use case is believed to be stable.

The default stability is stable; features will be explicitly marked as experimental or beta if they are not stable.

Experimental

The experimental stability category is used to denote that maintainers are exploring a new use case, and would like feedback.

• Experimental features are subject to frequent breaking changes.
• Experimental features can be removed with no equivalent replacement.
• Experimental features may require enabling feature flags to use.

Unless removed, experimental features eventually graduate to beta.

Beta

The beta stability category is used to denote a feature which is being matured.

• Beta features are subject to occasional breaking changes.
• Beta features can be replaced by equivalent functionality that covers the same use case.
• Beta features can be used without enabling feature flags.

Unless replaced with equivalent functionality, beta features eventually graduate to stable.

Stable

The stable stability category is used to denote a feature as stable.

• Breaking changes to stable features are rare, and will be well-documented.
• If new functionality is introduced to replace existing stable functionality, deprecation and removal timeline will be well-documented.
• Stable features can be used without enabling feature flags.