The main goal of issue triage is to categorize all incoming Grafana issues and make sure each issue has all the essential information needed for anyone to understand and be able to start working on it.
> **Note:** This information is for Grafana project Maintainers, Owners, and Admins. If you are a Contributor, then you won't be able to perform most of the tasks in this topic.
The core maintainers of the Grafana project are responsible for categorizing all incoming issues and delegating any critical or important issue to other maintainers. Currently, one maintainer each week is responsible. Besides that part, triage provides an important way to contribute to an open source project.
- Ensuring the issue's intent and purpose is conveyed precisely. This is necessary because it can be difficult for an issue to explain how an end user experiences a problem and what actions they took.
- Giving a contributor the information they need before they commit to resolving an issue.
- Lowering the issue count by preventing duplicate issues.
- Streamlining the development process by preventing duplicate discussions.
If you don't have the knowledge or time to code, consider helping with triage. The community will thank you for saving them time by spending some of yours.
The easiest and most straightforward way of getting started and finding issues that haven't been triaged is to browse [unlabeled issues](https://github.com/grafana/grafana/issues?q=is%3Aopen+is%3Aissue+no%3Alabel), and then work on them starting from the bottom to the top.
The more advanced, but recommended way is to subscribe to all notifications from this repository which means that all new issues, pull requests, comments and important status changes are sent to your configured email address. Read this [guide](https://help.github.com/en/articles/watching-and-unwatching-repositories#watching-a-single-repository) for help with setting this up.
It's highly recommended that you set up filters to automatically remove emails from the inbox and label them accordingly. When issues are properly categorized you can easily understand when you need to act upon a notification or where to look to find issues that haven't been triaged.
Instructions for setting up filters in Gmail can be found [here](#setting-up-gmail-filters). Another alternative is to use [Trailer](https://github.com/ptsochantaris/trailer) or similar software.
Before triaging an issue very far, make sure that the issue's author provided the standard information. This helps you make an educated recommendation on how to categorize the issue. The Grafana project uses [GitHub issue templates](https://docs.github.com/en/communities/using-templates-to-encourage-useful-issues-and-pull-requests/configuring-issue-templates-for-your-repository) to guide contributors to provide standard information that must be included for each type of template or type of issue.
Grafana uses various [issue templates](https://github.com/grafana/grafana/issues/new/choose) to collect information from the issue reporter. The following list describes the standard information that is included.
Bug reports should explain what happened, what was expected, and how to reproduce it. Also, it should include additional information that may help giving a complete picture of what happened such as screenshots, [query inspector](https://community.grafana.com/t/using-grafanas-query-inspector-to-troubleshoot-issues/2630) output, and any relevant information about the environment. For example:
> **Note:** Prior to August, 2023, community-submitted feature requests were submitted as [Github discussions](https://github.com/grafana/grafana/discussions). These are now submitted using the [feature request issue template](https://github.com/grafana/grafana/issues/new?assignees=&labels=type%2Ffeature-request&projects=&template=1-feature_requests.md).
When submitting an enhancement request we ask that users focus on the problem they'd like to solve and why it’s a problem rather than focusing on the solution itself. To facilitate these objectives, the feature requests template includes the following:
This is a mix between a bug report and enhancement request but focused on accessibility issues to help make Grafana improve keyboard navigation, screen-reader support, and general accessibility. The report should include relevant [WCAG criteria](https://www.w3.org/WAI/WCAG21/quickref/?versions=2.0), if applicable.
Grafana Labs is dedicated to improving our graphical user interfaces and overall experience so that our product becomes usable and accessible for people with disabilities as well as anyone else. Learn more about Grafana's commitment to [A11y](https://grafana.com/accessibility/) (accessibility).
In general, if the issue description and title is perceived as a question no more information is needed. See how to categorize these requests [here](#support-requests-1).
- Make sure that issue titles are named to explain the subject of the issue, are spelled correctly, and don't include irrelevant or sensitive information.
- Make sure that issue descriptions don't include irrelevant information, information from a template that hasn't been filled out, or sensitive information.
- Do your best effort to change the title and description or request suggested changes by adding a comment.
Depending on the issue, you might not feel all this information is needed. Use your best judgement. If you cannot triage an issue using what its author provided, explain kindly to the author that they must provide the previously mentioned information to clarify the problem. Label issue with `needs more info` and add any related `area/*` or `datasource/*` labels. Alternatively, use `bot/needs more info` label and the Grafana bot will request it for you.
If the author provides the standard information, but you are still unable to triage the issue, request additional information. Do this kindly and politely because you are asking for more of the author's time.
If the author does not respond to the requested information within a week, close the issue with a kind note stating that the author can request for the issue to be reopened when the necessary information is provided.
If you receive a notification with additional information provided, but you aren't on issue triage anymore and you feel you don't have time to handle it, you should delegate it to the current person on issue triage.
Make sure it's not a duplicate by searching existing issues using related terms from the issue title and description. If you think you know there is an existing issue, but can't find it, please reach out to one of the maintainers and ask for help. If you identify that the issue is a duplicate of an existing issue:
1. Label the issue `type/bug` and at least one `area/*` or `datasource/*` label.
1. If you know that maintainers won't be able to put any resources into it for some time then label the issue with `help wanted` and optionally `beginner friendly` together with pointers on which code to update to fix the bug. This should signal to the community that we would appreciate any help we can get to resolve this.
1. Move on to [prioritizing the issue](#4-prioritization-of-issues).
- Is this something we want and can maintain as a project?
- Is this referring to usage of some specific integration and in that case is that a popular use case in combination with Grafana?
- If unsure, kindly and politely add a comment explaining that we would need [upvotes](https://github.blog/2016-03-10-add-reactions-to-pull-requests-issues-and-comments) to identify that lots of other users want or need this.
1. Either delegate the work to someone else by assigning that person to the issue. Note that the milestone is automatically assigned and usually doesn't need to be manually edited.
1. Label the issue with `help wanted` and `beginner friendly`, if applicable, to signal that we find this important to fix and we would appreciate any help we can get from the community.
1. Kindly and politely direct the issue author to the [community site](https://community.grafana.com/) and explain that GitHub is mainly used for tracking bugs and feature requests. If possible, it's usually a good idea to add some pointers to the issue author's question.
This is the most difficult thing with triaging issues since it requires a lot of knowledge, context and experience before it is possible to skillfully add a specific priority label.
The key here is to ask for help and discuss issues to understand how more experienced project members think and reason. By doing that you learn more and eventually be more and more comfortable with prioritizing issues.
1. If a bug has been categorized and any of the following criteria apply, the bug should be labeled as critical and must be actively worked on as someone's top priority right now:
1. If applicable, label the issue `priority/support-subscription`.
1. Add the issue to the next upcoming patch or major/minor stable release milestone. Ask maintainers for help if unsure if it's a patch or not. Create a new milestone if there are none.
1. Make sure to add the issue to a suitable backlog of a GitHub project and prioritize it or assign someone to work on it now or very soon.
1. Consider requesting [help from the community](#5-requesting-help-from-the-community), even though it may be problematic given a short amount of time until it should be released.
It's generally a good idea to consider signaling to the community that help is appreciated and needed in case an issue isn't prioritized to be worked on by maintainers. Use your best judgement. In general, requesting help from the community means that a contribution has a good chance of getting accepted and merged.
In many cases the issue author or community as a whole is more suitable to contribute changes since they're experts in their domain. It's also quite common that someone has tried to get something to work using the documentation without success, made an effort to get it to work, reached out to the [community site](https://community.grafana.com/) to get the missing information, or some combination of these things.
- If possible or applicable, try to help contributors getting starting by adding pointers and references to what code needs to be changed. Note any suggests for good ways of solving or implementing the issue.
1. Label the issue with `help wanted`.
1. If applicable, label the issue with `beginner friendly` to denote that the issue is suitable for a beginner to work on.
1. If possible, try to estimate the amount of work by adding `effort/small`, `effort/medium` or `effort/large`.
When an issue has all basic information provided, but the triage responsible hasn't been able to reproduce the reported problem at a first glance, the issue is labeled [`triage/needs-confirmation`](https://github.com/grafana/grafana/labels/triage%2Fneeds-confirmation). Depending on the perceived severity and/or number of [upvotes](https://github.blog/2016-03-10-add-reactions-to-pull-requests-issues-and-comments), the investigation will either be delegated to another maintainer for further investigation or put on hold until someone else (maintainer or contributor) picks it up and eventually starts investigating it.
Investigating issues can be a very time consuming task, especially for the maintainers, given the huge number of combinations of plugins, data sources, platforms, databases, browsers, hardware, integrations, cloud services, and so on, that are used with Grafana. There are a certain number of combinations that are more common than others, and these are in general easier for maintainers to investigate.
For some other combinations it may not be possible at all for a maintainer to setup a proper test environment to investigate the issue. In these cases we really appreciate any help we can get from the community. Otherwise, the issue is highly likely to be closed.
Even if you don't have the time or knowledge to investigate an issue we highly recommend that you [upvote](https://github.blog/2016-03-10-add-reactions-to-pull-requests-issues-and-comments) the issue if you happen to have the same problem. If you have further details that may help investigating the issue, please provide as much information as possible.
We have some automation that triggers on comments or labels being added to issues. Many of these automated behaviors are defined in [commands.json](https://github.com/grafana/grafana/blob/main/.github/commands.json). Or in other [GitHub Actions](https://github.com/grafana/grafana/tree/main/.github/workflows)
Part of issue triage should also be triaging of external PRs. The main goal should be to make sure PRs from external contributors have an owner and aren't forgotten.
1. Check new external PRs which don't have a reviewer. You can easily search for pull requests made by external contributors by using the label: `pr/external` in your [query search](https://github.com/grafana/grafana/pulls?q=is%3Aopen+is%3Apr+label%3Apr%2Fexternal) Note: external PRs are automatically labeled with `pr/external` upon creation.
1. Check if there is a link to an existing issue. The link to a existing issue should be in the description section, underneath “Which issue(s) does this PR fix?:”. If not, and you know which issue it is solving, add the link yourself. Otherwise, ask the author to link the issue or create one.
1. Assign a reviewer based on who was handling the linked issue or what code or feature the PR touches (if all else fails, look at who was the last to make changes).
If you're using Gmail, a best practice is to set up filters to automatically remove emails from the inbox and label them to make it easy for you to understand when you need to act upon a notification. You should be able to promptly process all incoming issues that haven't been triaged.
