victoriametrics/helm-charts

Purpose and entry points

This repository publishes Helm charts for deploying the VictoriaMetrics observability ecosystem on Kubernetes: metrics, logs, traces, alerting, auth, collectors, MCP services, and an operator-based stack. Each charts/<name>/Chart.yaml is an independently installable entry point; its values.yaml drives rendering of Kubernetes manifests. Repository-level catalog metadata is in artifacthub-repo.yml.

Helm chart composition boundary

Charts follow the Helm model: values and chart dependencies are resolved from Chart.yaml/Chart.lock, then templates produce cluster resources. Templates commonly expose Services, ingress/route, network policies, service accounts/RBAC, monitoring CRs, autoscaling, and optional user-supplied extra objects.

Paths: charts/victoria-metrics-single/Chart.yaml, charts/victoria-metrics-single/values.yaml, charts/victoria-metrics-single/templates/server.yaml.

Metrics deployment topologies

Metrics has single-node, cluster, agent, alerting, gateway, auth, and distributed deployment charts. Cluster mode partitions the runtime into ingest (vminsert), query (vmselect), and durable storage (vmstorage), optionally fronted by vmauth; the equivalent single chart deploys one server with optional persistent storage and scrape/relabel configuration.

Paths: charts/victoria-metrics-cluster/templates/vminsert-server.yaml, charts/victoria-metrics-cluster/templates/vmselect-server.yaml, charts/victoria-metrics-cluster/templates/vmstorage-server.yaml; charts/victoria-metrics-single/templates/pvc.yaml.

Logs and traces pipelines

Logs and traces charts similarly offer single-node and horizontally separated cluster forms. Cluster traffic enters insert services, is stored by storage services, and is queried through select services; auth is an optional boundary. Logs additionally includes agent/collector charts and Vector configuration for collection/forwarding.

Paths: charts/victoria-logs-cluster/templates/vlinsert-server.yaml, charts/victoria-logs-cluster/templates/vlstorage-server.yaml, charts/victoria-logs-cluster/templates/vlselect-server.yaml; charts/victoria-traces-cluster/templates/vtinsert-server.yaml, charts/victoria-logs-collector/templates/server.yaml.

Operator and integrated stack

The operator chart installs the VictoriaMetrics Operator runtime, RBAC, webhook, and CRD delivery machinery. The k8s-stack chart composes operator-managed custom resources for metrics, logs, traces, alerting, auth, and Grafana integration, making the Kubernetes API/CRDs the control-plane boundary rather than directly creating every workload.

Paths: charts/victoria-metrics-operator/templates/server.yaml, charts/victoria-metrics-operator/templates/webhook.yaml, charts/victoria-metrics-operator/charts/crds/templates/job.yaml; charts/victoria-metrics-k8s-stack/templates/victoria-metrics-operator/vmcluster/vmcluster.yaml.

Shared and external integrations

victoria-metrics-common supplies reusable Helm template primitives consumed as a chart dependency. Deployment targets Kubernetes and may integrate with Grafana, Prometheus-style scraping/ServiceMonitor resources, OpenShift Routes, ingress controllers, persistent volumes, and Kubernetes autoscalers. The distributed chart adds per-availability-zone topologies and separate read/write auth proxies.

Paths: charts/victoria-metrics-common/templates/_pod.tpl, charts/victoria-metrics-distributed/templates/vmauth-read.yaml, charts/victoria-metrics-distributed/templates/per-az/vmcluster.yaml.

Release and validation flow

GitHub Actions runs linting, testing, documentation, releases, and release synchronization. Helm-template snapshot tests live within charts, while Go integration tests exercise chart behavior across the catalog. The Go sync-job is a separate runnable utility for synchronizing dashboards and rules into the stack.

Paths: .github/workflows/release.yaml, test/main_test.go, hack/sync-job/main.go, charts/victoria-metrics-k8s-stack/templates/sync-job/job.yaml.