Important: This documentation is about an older version. It's relevant only to the release noted, many of the features and functions have been updated or replaced. Please view the current version.

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.