Kickstart grafana-community/helm-charts

[jkroepke]

Note

Dear community, we are current PLAN to transition from github.com/grafana/helm-charts to github.com/grafana-community/helm-charts
At this momenet, github.com/grafana/helm-charts will be continued to maintain by us until we have a plan.

We finally have a home for maintaining community Helm charts for Grafana projects. To streamline the migration, we should decide what we maintain here and what remains at github.com/grafana/helm-charts.

Chart list

Name	Status	Clarified
agent-operator	EOL	✅
cloudcost-exporter	github.com/grafana/helm-charts	✅
enterprise-logs	EOL	✅
enterprise-metrics	EOL	✅
fluent-bit	EOL	✅
grafana-agent	EOL	✅
grafana-mcp	github.com/grafana-community/helm-charts	✅
grafana-sampling	github.com/grafana/helm-charts (owned by grafana?)	❓
grafana	github.com/grafana-community/helm-charts	✅
k8s-monitoring	github.com/grafana/helm-charts	✅
lgtm-distributed	EOL	✅
loki-canary	EOL	✅
loki-distributed	EOL	✅
loki-simple-scalable	EOL	✅
loki-stack	EOL	✅
pdc-agent	github.com/grafana/helm-charts (owned by @grafana/grafana-datasources-core-services)	❓
promtail	EOL	✅
rollout-operator	github.com/grafana/helm-charts	❓
snyk-exporter	EOL	✅
synthetic-monitoring-agent	github.com/grafana-community/helm-charts	✅
tempo-distributed	github.com/grafana-community/helm-charts	✅
tempo-vulture	github.com/grafana-community/helm-charts	✅
tempo	github.com/grafana-community/helm-charts	✅

Migration steps

Maintenance continues at github.com/grafana/helm-charts until a migration plan is finalized.

1. Grafana should confirm the chart list. It would be great if @moxious can raise this internally.
2. Clarify chart maintainers.
3. Deprecate and publish the charts that will continue to be maintained at github.com/grafana-community/helm-charts.
4. Perform a sync from github.com/grafana/helm-charts to github.com/grafana-community/helm-charts.
5. Remove the deprecation for the maintained charts and publish new versions.
6. Remove all EOL and non community charts.
7. Publish a social media announcement about the new home of the Grafana Helm charts.

Timeline

I would prefer a migration near the end of January. Grafana charts are widely used and changes should not happen during the holiday season. Many of us remember how similar timing caused issues last year at Broadcom.

Organisation

Similar to the approach used by prometheus-community, I suggest a structure where admins oversee the community and chart maintainers take responsibility for individual charts.

• Use CODEOWNERS to clarify responsibilities.
• Use the DCO app to ensure contribution permissions.
• Use Renovate to automatically update chart versions with auto merge enabled. For auto merges, a dedicated GitHub app will be needed.

Initial Maintainers

@QuentinBisson, @DrFaust92, @Sheikh-Abubaker, @KyriosGN0, @jkroepke

[QuentinBisson]

I think tempo-distributed should be moved to github.com/grafana-community/helm-charts.

I am not so sure about vulture, because I think it should be a part of the tempo-distributed, like mimir-continuous-test or loki canary are a part of mimir-distributed and the loki chart

[KyriosGN0]

I think the tempo charts (both distributed and the monolithic) should be moved to the grafana-community unless there are plans to move them to the tempo repository (like loki or mimir)
I agree with @QuentinBisson that vulture is best suited to be a part of the tempo charts (either distributed or the monolithic one)

[moxious]

Current info I have from Grafana perspective, all of the following are still Grafana maintained. In grafana-community I would recommend fully removing them from the fork, for avoidance of confusion. If you like, I will raise this PR, to remove from this repo:

• cloudcost-exporter
• k8s-monitoring

That's all I have information on at this moment. That's not guaranteed to be a complete list, but the list is at least that.

When in doubt, don't remove it, but those at least can be removed from the community fork + remove anything else that's already EOL and has no community maintainer. Really, paring this repo back to only stuff actively wanted & maintained puts the repo on the best footing. After initial obvious removals, you may have a few things left over; maybe give it 90 days to see if anyone shows up late, if not, remove later.

[jkroepke]

Thanks for the update. I edit the chart list above and added Clarified section.

I will raise this PR,

To avoid any confusion or deadlocks. I would suggest to not touch the code base here and continue to main github.com/grafana/helm-charts until we have a cut-over planned. I hope this will prevent the code from diverging, so that different releases with the same version number are not published.

[DrFaust92]

Id like to open a channel in the grafana slack so we can communicate more easily, how does #community-helm-charts sound?

@jkroepke @QuentinBisson @KyriosGN0 @Sheikh-Abubaker

[jkroepke]

Slack is good more quick and short communication, but messages are gone after 90 days. We have the same on the prometheus-community. That why some topic are better on GitHub.

[moxious]

n.b. this repo inherited at CODEOWNERS from the old repo which already lists key people for the grafana chart:

helm-charts/.github/CODEOWNERS

Line 9 in 37c5e12

/charts/grafana/ @jkroepke @maorfr @torstenwalter @Xtigyro @zanhsieh @QuentinBisson

That particular chart I think the intent is to host here; as it won't get updates on the Grafana side, clarified that internally already. grafana#4042

[javiermolinar]

@jkroepke From the Tempo team’s perspective, we’ve discussed this internally and decided to hand over maintenance of the following three Helm charts to the community:

• tempo
• tempo-distributed
• tempo-vulture

We still need to keep tempo-distributed in
https://github.com/grafana/helm-charts/tree/main/charts/tempo-distributed
as it is currently used for Grafana Enterprise Tempo. However, we can place it in maintenance mode.

As a heads-up, Tempo is planning a major 3.0 release early next year. This release will introduce new components and will most likely come with a new Helm chart maintained by us directly in the Tempo repository.

cc @moxious,@RichiH

[moxious]

If anyone here is feeling motivated, what we're doing on this issue is the perfect example of the kind of thing that would make a good GrafanaCON CFP -- https://grafana.com/events/grafanacon/