Remove Feature Toggles that are greater than 1 year old

[cakennedy]

In an effort to reduce costs by reducing cardinality in our metrics and other instrumentation, and to facilitate migration off of the old feature flag system,Dave Henderson put together a list of all the feature toggles that are older than one year, for each squad. He’s asked that we take action on these feature flags:

• If the features are not going to progress beyond experiments, let's consider deleting them
• If they are going to progress, let's prioritize that
• If they should really just be settings (not feature flags), let's fix that

For Logs Drilldown, there are several:

• lokiExperimentalStreaming
• lokiLogsDataplane
• logsExploreTableDefaultVisualization,
• exploreLogsShardSplitting (keep and migrate to the new feature flag system)
• exploreLogsLimitedTimeRange
• exploreLogsAggregatedMetrics, (Loki squad won't have time to promote aggregated metrics API to GA by deadline so we need to convert this to the new feature flag format. Trevor won't let Galen delete it.)
• lokiShardSplitting (keep and migrate to the new feature flag system)
• logsContext
• dataplane (oss-big-tent) meet with them turn on everywhere, etc data frame contact spec, time and line to timestamp and body. Only affects logs not metrics.
• lokiQueryLimitsContext (less then 1 year old, but needs to be long lived toggle, reassign to big tent?)

The task is to make a decision about them that allows us to remove the feature toggle, then implement the decision. So, if the decision is that the functionality controlled by this feature toggle is no longer needed, the implementation will be to remove the toggle and the functionality. Alternatively, the decision could be to promote the functionality to be unconditionally available and remove the toggle. Or, as a third alternative, the toggle needs to be turned into a setting.

Once the decision has been made and implemented, please also go back to the spreadsheet and update the status for the feature toggle.

Docs and Example in Metric

• Metrics, deployment tools
• Docs, how does this work in core?

Todos

• Try converting one to the GOFF shard splitting
• Start the easy stuff now and follow up in Q1
• App platform is using the old or new toggles? 😮‍💨
• There are more flags: logsContext?

[L2D2Grafana]

Thank you @cakennedy we are looking into starting converting some of the easy feature flags now. For more complex cases we will aim to wrap it up at the end of Q1. I've found the docs for adding the new flags in a plugin and the example initialization in Metrics. Let us know if you know of any docs on how to handle this in core grafana!

[L2D2Grafana]

It is okay to keep a flag as experimental and access it in the new framework. https://raintank-corp.slack.com/archives/C04TRENCD2L/p1769531906675019?thread_ts=1769192781.067279&cid=C04TRENCD2L