Release life cycle for Grafana Labs
Grafana Labs products, projects, and features can go through multiple release stages before becoming generally available. These stages in the release life cycle can present varying degrees of stability and support. The following are the Grafana Labs release stages:
- Experimental
- Private preview
- Public preview
- General availability (GA)
Quick reference table
| Description | Experimental | Private preview | Public preview | General availability |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Audience | Open source engineers and free cloud accounts | Invited customers | Early adopters and users who request access | Available to all customers at the appropriate account tier |
| Risk | High (unknown) risk | Medium-high risk | Low-medium risk | Low (known) risk |
| Support | Not supported; OSS users can create issues in GitHub | Limited support from the Engineering team only | Support limited to enablement and configuration | Fully supported / on-call |
| Documentation | Code comments | Unofficial; communicated with participants | Limited; publicly available | Publicly available |
| Service-level agreement (SLA) | No | No | No | Yes |
Experimental
Projects and features in the experimental stage are supported only by the Engineering teams; on-call support is not available. Documentation is either limited or not provided outside of code comments. No SLA is provided.
Experimental projects or features are primarily intended for open source engineers who want to participate in ensuring systems stability, and to gain consensus and approval for open source governance projects.
Projects and features in the experimental stage are not meant to be used in production environments, and the risks are unknown/high.
Private preview
Features and products in private preview are supported by Project Managers and Engineers. Some on-call support might be available. Documentation is limited and privately communicated to participants. No SLA is provided.
Grafana invites a limited group of users to participate in private previews. Engineers actively work with users in order to gather feedback and make improvements.
Products and features in private preview are not meant to be used in production environments, and the risks are medium/high. Participants must sign the Grafana Labs Beta Product(s) Agreement.
Public preview
Features and products in public preview are supported by our Support teams, but might be limited to enablement, configuration, and some troubleshooting. Bugs and issues are escalated to Engineering teams. Some on-call support might be available. Documentation might be limited, but is publicly available. SLAs are not available.
Users interested in early adoption and users that have shown interest to Grafana representatives can request access to features in public preview.
Products and features in public preview are not meant to be used in production environments, and the risks are medium/low.
General Availability
Features and products in general availability are fully supported and covered by SLA. On-call support is available. Risks are known and considered low.
Features and products in the GA stage are available to the public and are considered safe for production environments.
