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Deprecation policy
We do our best to limit breaking changes and the deprecation of features to major releases. We always do our best not to introduce breaking changes in order to make upgrading Grafana as easy and reliable as possible. However, at times we have to introduce a breaking change by changing behavior or by removing a feature.
To minimize the negative effects of removing a feature we require a deprecation plan that includes:
- Determine usage levels of the feature.
- Find alternative solutions and possible migration paths.
- Announce deprecation of the feature.
- Migrate users if possible
- Give users time to adjust to the deprecation.
- Disable the feature by default.
- Remove the feature from the code base.
Depending on the size and importance of the feature this can be a design doc or an issue. We want this to be written communication for all parties so we know it's intentional and that did a reasonable attempt to avoid breaking changes unless needed. The size of the feature also means different notice times between Depreciation and disabling as well as disabling and removal. The actual duration will depend on releases of Grafana and the table below should be used as a guide.
Grafana employees can find more details in our internal docs.
Grace period between announcement and disabling feature by default
| Size | Duration | Example |
|---|---|---|
| Large | 1-2 years | Classic alerting, scripted dashboards, AngularJS |
| Medium | 6 months | Supported Database for Grafana's backend |
| Small | 1-3 months | Refresh OAuth access_token automatically using the refresh_token |
Announced deprecations.
| Name | Announcement Date | Disabling date | Removal Date | Description | Status |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Support for Mysql 5.7 | 2023-05-15 | October 2023 | MySQL 5.7 is being deprecated in October 2023 and Grafana's policy is to test against the officially supported version. | Planned |