About

With polly, we're building on the shoulder of giants, or in other words: this is not the first attempt to make observability tooling templating work. It all started out in 04/2018 with Frederic Branczyk proposing Jsonnet Package Management which was further on adopted in several places such as Prometheus Monitoring Mixins which had the tagline:

A mixin is a set of Grafana dashboards and Prometheus rules and alerts, packaged together in a reuseable and extensible bundle. Mixins are written in jsonnet, and are typically installed and updated with jsonnet-bundler.

The Mixins, based on jsonnet and maintained alongside the tool turned out to be a great idea, however, over time certain challenges and limitations became apparent.

These shortcomings led to a desire to improve on the existing work on Mixins, resulting in what we now know as polly. Initially simply called Mixins-NG (next generation), the work around polly kicked off publicly in April 2021, with Sam Boyer's mail to the newly created Mixins mailing list.

At that point, sam already had been working on the concept and core formalization for several months, broadening the group of folks involved, initially a small group of interested folks, a mixture of past and future stakeholders and contributors to Mixins.

At this point, polly doesn't have a formal governance body or rule set, but we do have:

• A guide on how to contribute to polly.
• The commitment that polly and the artifacts in the organization are available under Apache License Version 2.0 and will continue to be so.

For any questions or suggestions, we ask you to use the polly project discussion section in the main repo.

sam, Matthias, Michael