Inside Grafana Labs’ Voice of Customer program: what’s new and what’s next

At Grafana Labs, openness isn’t just our approach to building software — it’s a core company value that reflects how we engage with our community. This includes being transparent about how we collect product feedback, how it’s reviewed, and how it informs what we build.

We’re always striving to tighten the loop between what our users ask for and what we prioritize in R&D. Our Voice of Customer (VoC) program — a centralized effort to collect, triage, and share product feedback from our user base — is one of the key ways we achieve this. 

In this post, we’ll unpack what the VoC program is, share real examples of how it’s shaped product direction here at Grafana Labs, and highlight recent updates like our new customer-facing portal.

VoC program: what it is and why it matters

Our VoC program began as a simple spreadsheet that helped us log incoming requests from Grafana Cloud users. But as feedback grew, so did the need for structure. 

We introduced reporting, analysis, regular reviews, and tighter alignment with product and engineering. Today, VoC acts as a structured, reliable signal that helps teams spot patterns, validate use cases, and build with more context.

We have a dedicated team focused on this work, with individual team members aligned to specific product areas. This dedicated team reviews and triages every request for our product and engineering teams, and themes and trends are regularly analyzed and shared.

Having a dedicated team means we can keep this process consistent and scalable. It also helps us spot and connect related requests across different areas of our product portfolio — something that’s easy to miss in more fragmented setups.

About 35% of the requests submitted through our Voice of Customer program have been actioned — meaning they’ve either been accepted and are in progress, or have already resulted in new features or initiatives. While we’ve anecdotally heard estimates like 10–15% from other product teams, we haven’t found any reliable industry benchmarks to compare against. For now, 35% is our current baseline, and we’re focused on improving it as the program grows.

Examples of VoC impact 

Running Grafana Cloud at scale internally gives us a unique perspective, but we know our needs aren’t always the same as our customers’. We strive to meet a broad range of use cases, environments, and operational realities.

Voice of the Customer plays a key role in ensuring that we’re not only optimizing for our own experience. It helps us identify patterns across users and build for the widest possible impact.

“As our products evolve, we always want to ensure we are building features that align with our customer use cases,” said Ryan Kehoe, Staff Product Manager at Grafana Labs. “VoC has been critical in providing my teams with direct customer feedback through all phases of the software delivery lifecycle so we can build with confidence and pivot if we miss the mark.”

Here’s a look at some recent product updates — and on-going initiatives — that have been shaped heavily by VoC user feedback:

Expanding RBAC across products

One of the most consistently requested capabilities across VoC feedback is fine-grained access control — not just in one area, but across our stack. Thanks to this signal, we’ve shipped RBAC capabilities and improvements across multiple Grafana Cloud features, including Frontend Observability, Alerting (silences, contact points, subfolders, Dynamic alerting, and notification policies), Synthetic Monitoring, and IRM. This continues to be a major theme for us and we are committed to expanding and refining RBAC support over time.

Improving cost visibility and control

Cost control and attribution have been a significant theme in user feedback, especially from teams managing multiple environments or stakeholders. In response, we’ve launched several foundational improvements, including updates to our billing dashboards and usage APIs, to help teams understand where the spend is going. We’ve also introduced Adaptive Telemetry to help reduce noise and manage cost without losing critical observability signals. 

“It was crucial for our organization to have an in-depth volume and cost breakdown of telemetry for monthly internal chargebacks, and to ensure compliance of cost centers against set budgets. To our delight, Grafana was able to deliver the necessary component,” said Peter Vernigorov, Principal Engineer at Delivery Hero. “They took the time to understand our needs by collaborating with our observability and FinOps engineers, and we really appreciated their quick iterative approach.” 

Programmatic workflows: Terraform, APIs, and Git Sync

Another recurring theme in user feedback has been the need to manage Grafana programmatically. This shows up across products: requests for more Terraform coverage, better APIs, and Git-based workflows for dashboards and configurations. In response, we continue to expand our Terraform provider to cover more resources, and introduced Git Sync — an observability as code tool that brings Git workflows directly into the Grafana UI — in the Grafana 12 release. 

Secrets management for Grafana Cloud Synthetic Monitoring

A top request from users running synthetic checks in production environments has been the ability to securely store and inject sensitive values without hardcoding them in scripts. Today, that’s difficult to do safely, which introduces risk and complicates compliance. We’re actively building a secure secrets management flow that allows sensitive data to be stored in a backend secrets store, injected into scripts as environment variables, and fully hidden from the UI and logs. 

“Secrets management kept coming up again and again in our Voice of the Customer feedback. It was one of the biggest pain points for Synthetic Monitoring users and a real blocker for adoption,” said Mark Meier, Staff Product Manager at Grafana Labs. “Having that VoC data made a huge difference, helping turn user feedback into real momentum.”

Stay tuned for more updates. 

What’s new: the VoC customer-facing portal

We’ve rolled out a customer-facing Feature Request Portal to make our feedback process more efficient and transparent. 

Previously, all feedback would be filtered manually through Grafana Labs account teams. Now, with the new VoC portal, users can see what’s already been requested, vote or comment on those requests with additional context, and track ideas across their organization.

• Submit and view all Grafana Labs feature requests
• Upvote existing feature requests
• Comment to clarify use cases
• Track requests their org has submitted or supported

When users can easily see and engage with existing ideas, we get a clearer view of which requests are shared and gaining traction. It also allows people to gauge the popularity of something they are interested in compared to other ideas.

If you’re a Grafana Cloud user, you can log in to the Feature Request Portal today to view, vote on, and submit ideas directly to Grafana Labs.

What’s next: extending the reach of VoC

The Voice of Customer program started by focusing on all Grafana Cloud customers. These customers often run our products in complex environments, rely on tightly integrated features, and generate high-signal feedback that’s directly tied to day-to-day workflows. This was a natural starting point as we built out our structure, scale, and process for the VoC program.

But our roots are in open source, and we know that some of our most thoughtful feedback comes from our OSS community. Community input has always been part of the picture — through GitHub issues, forums, Slack, and direct conversations — but it’s often reached teams informally and inconsistently.

Now, we’re working to integrate that feedback more systematically. The next phase of the VoC program involves partnering with teams across Grafana Labs to ensure that input from our open source users is captured, distilled, and represented alongside our cloud customer signals. This isn’t about replacing those processes for collecting feedback, but expanding the scope. 

Lastly, we want to thank everyone who’s taken the time to share feedback — whether it’s through the feature request portal, GitHub issues, Slack threads, Technical Support, or hallway conversations at an event. You’ve helped shape the products we’re building, and we’re so grateful for your input. 

Voice of Customer program FAQs

What is the Voice of the Customer program at Grafana Labs?

The Voice of Customer (VoC) program is our structured approach to collecting, analyzing, and actioning on product feedback from our users. It serves as a centralized, reliable signal that helps our team spot patterns, validate use cases, and build with more context. While running Grafana Cloud internally gives us deep insight, VoC ensures we are not just building for our own needs, but for the broad range of environments, challenges, and realities our users face.

How does Grafana Labs prioritize VoC feature requests?

We prioritize feature requests based on the number of organizations asking for the same thing — not individual votes. A single vote from 10 different companies carries more weight than 10 votes from the same company. This approach helps us ensure that we’re investing in features that solve widespread problems. 

When will my feature request be reviewed?

In most cases, feature requests are prioritized for review once we see interest from multiple organizations. We look for themes and patterns across our customer base so we can focus on building solutions that have broad impact. That said, there are cases where requests get reviewed earlier, especially if they align with something already on the roadmap or support a strategic initiative. While multi-org interest is the most common trigger, it’s not the only one. Every request is captured and visible to our Product team.

How long does it take from submission > review > launch?

There’s no guaranteed timeline from submission to review to launch. It depends on several factors: how many customers are asking, how the request aligns with our current strategy and roadmap, and what other work is already in motion. Even if a request is prioritized for review, that doesn’t always mean it will be built. We aim to solve the right problems in the most scalable way, sometimes finding alternate paths or grouping similar feedback.

What about community feedback?

Community feedback has always been valuable to our product improvement. We hear from users through GitHub issues, forums, community Slack, and direct conversations, and that input has shaped many features over the years.

Those channels aren’t going away. If you’re already sharing feedback through GitHub or other public forums, please keep doing what you’re doing. That signal is important, and it’s not being replaced.

We’re working to better connect that feedback to the broader Voice of Customer program so that insights from open source users are captured more consistently and represented alongside what we hear from cloud customers. This will help us spot shared patterns across all users, regardless of how or where they run Grafana.

How can I learn more about Voice of Customer?

You can visit the Resources tab in the VoC portal to find information on using the portal, answers to common questions, and more details on our processes. For any other questions, contact voc-shared-inbox@grafana.com.

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