Signal Forge ADR-005: Separate collector configmaps per deployment mode

Signal Forge ADR-005: Separate collector configmaps per deployment mode

Status: Accepted

Decision: The Alloy collector configuration is split by mode:

• Cloud: k8s/monitoring/grafana-helm/values-cloud.yaml.tmpl — Helm values rendered by deploy-local.sh when monitoring.mode: cloud; destinations are Grafana Cloud Tempo/Mimir/Loki.
• Local: k8s/monitoring/grafana/local/configmap.yaml — hand-rolled Alloy configmap applied when monitoring.mode: local; destinations are in-cluster Jaeger, Prometheus, and Loki.

./deploy-local.sh selects the correct values file / configmap based on monitoring.mode in conf.yml.

Rationale:

• A single configmap with conditional blocks or “empty endpoint = no-op” logic obscures intent. Operators reading the deployed configmap should see exactly what is running.
• Cloud and local pipelines have structurally different exporters (otelcol.exporter.otlp + otelcol.auth.basic vs otelcol.exporter.otlp with tls.insecure = true + prometheus.remote_write). These are not cosmetic differences.
• The split prevents accidental cloud credential exposure in local-only deployments.

Alternative considered: Single configmap with empty-endpoint guards — rejected because it conflates two deployment modes and produces misleading no-op exporter logs.

Addendum (single-sourced trace correlation): The one piece of logic that was genuinely identical in both configs — the trace-ID/span-ID → Loki structured-metadata correlation stages — is now authored once at k8s/monitoring/grafana/shared/trace-correlation-stages.alloy and spliced into both configmap.yaml.tmpl (raw) and values-cloud.yaml.tmpl (Helm-tpl-escaped) by deploy-local.sh (render_local_alloy_configmap() / render_helm_values()). This doesn’t change the rationale above — the two pipelines still have separate, structurally different files; it just stops one specific snippet from silently drifting when only one side gets edited.