Business intelligence plugins for Grafana: what's next

Volkov Labs has been a longtime partner to Grafana Labs, with co-founder Mikhail Volkov contributing to Grafana in the early stages of the OSS project. On Sept. 26, the Florida-based company that recently created a suite of business intelligence (BI) plugins for Grafana announced it had been acquired. In light of the news, Grafana Labs committed to taking over the maintenance and development of their popular business intelligence (BI) plugin suite.

As of November, we have forked the BI plugins so that they are under the Grafana GitHub organization and we have enabled GitHub issues in all the repositories so that users can raise bug reports and ideas for enhancements. We have published new versions of the plugins to the Grafana plugin catalog under the same plugin ID and they are still community plugins. This means if you are a current user, you can simply upgrade your plugins to start using the Grafana Labs-published version without any interruptions in service. 

Our goal is to ensure continuity for the Grafana community while developing timely compatibility updates. We are currently committing to a maintenance period up until July 2026, during which we will ensure that the BI plugins are compatible with the next major release of Grafana coming in April. (One exception: For Business Input, we will maintain this compatibility for Grafana 12.x only). 

While there are no current plans for new features for the plugins, bug fixes and community PR reviews will be done on a best effort basis. We will also respond to first- and third-party CVEs as appropriate during this maintenance period.

A closer look at BI plugins for Grafana

Mikhail has always been an active member of the Grafana community, even serving as a Grafana Champion in recent years along with Volkov Labs creative director Daria Volkova. Their most substantial contribution has been a suite of business intelligence visualization plugins, which have been widely adopted as more users extend their observability practice to business analytics in order to drive better business outcomes. We also saw them leveraged in use cases beyond BI by winners from our annual Golden Grot Awards, which recognize standout Grafana dashboards from the community. 

At Grafana Labs, using Grafana Cloud for business intelligence is also a widely adopted practice. Grafanistas in marketing, product, revenue operations, and data have been longtime users of the Volkov Labs plugins, using them across our internal tooling, product analytics, and our most recent Observability Survey dashboard.

Some of the most popular BI plugins created by Volkov Labs include:

• Business Charts: Integrates with the Apache ECharts library to create dynamic, interactive visualizations for your dashboards. This plugin gives you instant access to hundreds more visualizations.

• Business Variable: This panel transforms how you interact with Grafana dashboard variables. Place it anywhere on your dashboard and choose from multiple layouts, including an advanced TreeView option, to simplify filtering and boost usability.

• Business Media: This plugin is designed to display a variety of media files, including PNG, JPG, GIF, MP4, WEBM, MP3, OGG, and PDF, using base64 encoding or direct URLs. Now you can seamlessly insert multimedia content into your Grafana dashboards.

The business intelligence plugins have been instrumental for many users in our community and within our company, and we are committed to ensuring a seamless transition. 

They also mark a major step in building out more business analytics capabilities in our offerings as we aim to bring the benefits of observability to every corner of a business.

Learn more about business intelligence plugins for Grafana

Our commitment is to provide uninterrupted access for these valuable BI plugins. We also want to give our teams and the community time to assess which business intelligence plugins may require additional support. 

To learn more about each BI plugin, check out the documentation that we have published on the Grafana Labs site. 

If you run into any issues with these business intelligence plugins

• In Grafana Cloud or Grafana Enterprise: Please contact Grafana Labs support for any issues with the plugins.
• In Grafana OSS: We encourage you to utilize our community forums, GitHub, or Community Slack channels for assistance and discussions.

We look forward to continuing to offer these business intelligence plugins to the Grafana community.