Grafana Labs’ Voice of Customer program: 2025 unwrapped and what’s next

At Grafana Labs, listening to customer feedback isn’t just a checkbox, it’s a guiding principle. 

We’re not just collecting input. We’re actively paying attention to it, connecting it, and using it to shape what we build next. Our Voice of Customer (VoC) program — a centralized effort to collect, triage, and share feedback from our user base across both our OSS and Grafana Cloud offerings — is one of the key ways we achieve this. And in 2025, we took a major step forward by launching our customer-facing feedback portal as part of the VoC program, giving users a more open and direct way to share what matters most to them. 

Since then, we’ve continued to expand the scope of the VoC program to better reflect the breadth of our user base. Over the past year, we’ve brought together signals from across the business, including insights from customer-facing teams that work closely with users, direct engagement through the feedback portal, conversations in the Grafana community channels, and strategic input from our Customer Advisory Board (CAB).

Together, these signals told a clear story. In this post, we’ll unpack 2025 through the VoC lens, including the standout numbers and patterns that emerged, and explore what’s to come in 2026.

VoC program: 2025 by the numbers

This past year, user feedback came in from every channel: internal teams submitting on behalf of customers, our dedicated portal, and valuable Slack discussions internally and on shared channels. 

Within the VoC program, we track ideas as distinct feature requests, and use votes to tally user demand for the same concept. Here’s a breakdown of what we saw in 2025:

• Total new ideas submitted: 2,160
• Total votes: 6,867
• Monthly average new ideas each month: 190 
• Monthly average votes each month: 416
• Peak month: March with 269 ideas and 585 votes 
• Product area with the most ideas and votes submitted: IRM with 245 new ideas and 923 total votes
• Number of ideas addressed (with new features or feature updates): 379
• Top-voted ideas that became a release: Allowing customers to track their own feature requests (addressed with our customer portal!) with 92 votes, followed closely by Secrets management for Grafana Cloud Synthetic Monitoring (now in public preview) with 89 votes 
• Fastest idea submitted to release: [Loki] Support sidecar containers as extraContainers with Backend component in Simple Scalable Mode → submitted March 4th and released 3 days later! 

These counts aren't just numbers; they represent both real engagement from users who took time to share what matters most to them and also real outcomes driven by that feedback.

Where we’re listening: feedback channels that drove insight

In 2025, we listened across more channels than ever before. By bringing together feedback from the field, direct customer engagement through our support channels, and community-driven conversations, we have built a more comprehensive view of the user experience and stronger signals for informed product decision-making.

Feedback submitted by customer-facing teams 

Customer-facing teams within Grafana Labs continued to be one of our strongest sources of feedback in 2025. Account and support teams regularly submitted ideas and votes that were rooted in real customer conversations, drawing from support tickets, Slack threads, and direct discussions.

2025 highlights from customer-facing teams:

• Total new ideas submitted: 1,992
• Total votes: 2,069
• Top-voted product areas: 
  • Alerting - 238 votes
  • IRM - 202 votes 
  • OSS and Enterprise plugins - 171 votes 

Feedback from the customer portal

Our customer-facing feedback portal continued to gain traction. It’s now a primary place where customers can directly submit ideas, align around shared priorities through voting, and track progress transparently. 

Highlights from portal usage:

• Total new ideas submitted: 168 
• Total votes: 2,020
• Total comments: 167
• Top-voted product areas: 
  • IRM - 254 votes
  • Identity and Access Management - 212 votes 
  • Alerting - 164 votes

Product managers also actively engaged with customers in the portal. These dynamic conversations were key to refining ideas and gathering richer insights needed to move forward. For example, our PM team was highly engaged with users who requested the idea “Introduce Specific RBAC Roles for Fleet Management,” sharing details on our approach, discussing the customer’s use case, and confirming the implementation successfully met their needs.

Feedback from our CAB

Over the past year, our Customer Advisory Board has become more integrated with the Voice of Customer program, allowing us to track individual feedback from CAB members more directly. As part of that, we’re ensuring all input captured reaches the respective Grafana Labs team(s) who can take action on that feedback. This also means that we can track those items more directly, showing the impact of the feedback that our CAB members give us.

Customer insights from VoC in 2025

In 2025, our customers spoke loud and clear: IRM, plugins, and ops alerting were topics with the most engagement across all feedback channels, accounting for 2,415 votes. We listened and delivered 103 improvements — meaning either new features or feature updates— across those areas.

IRM:

• 245 ideas created in 2025
• 923 votes cast across IRM ideas
• 26 ideas delivered in 2025 (11% delivery rate) 

OSS and Enterprise plugins:

• 158 ideas created in 2025
• 656 votes cast across OSS/Enterprise plugin ideas 
• 54 ideas delivered in 2025 (34% delivery rate)

Alerting:

• 197 ideas created in 2025
• 836 votes cast across alerting ideas 
• 23 ideas delivered in 2025 (12% delivery rate) 

Votes vs. ideas: how engagement evolved

As we rolled out the customer-facing portal in 2025, one clear pattern emerged: users didn't just start submitting more ideas, they began rallying around existing ones, expressing their preferences through increased voting activity.

Engagement trend highlights:

• First vote cast in our customer portal: May 6, 2025
• 2,034 total portal votes since launch
• Average of 254 votes/month after launch
• 168 ideas from customers = 21 new ideas/month
• 12:1 vote-to-idea ratio shows customers prefer validating existing ideas over duplicating requests
• Most-voted idea: Allow customers to manage grafana.com portal accounts via customer's auth / SSO / okta / saml with 49 portal votes

Looking ahead in 2026

As we look ahead to 2026, our focus isn’t just on collecting more feedback; it’s on making feedback easier to connect with, understand, and act on.

Connecting signals at scale: We’re enhancing our integration of feedback across all sources, including community discussions, the feedback portal, customer conversations, and CAB insights. By using LLMs and AI-powered tools, we’ll synthesize signals faster, identify patterns with greater confidence, and reduce noise without losing context.

Embedding VoC into product planning: We’re working closely with product managers to make VoC a natural input to quarterly planning and roadmap documentation. That means surfacing the right insights at the right time, in formats that fit into existing planning workflows.

Doubling down on CAB insights: Our Customer Advisory Board will continue to provide deep, strategic input from some of our most engaged customers. We’ll keep folding CAB feedback into broader VoC signals to help validate priorities and sharpen our understanding of what matters most.

Making insights easier to act on: Bringing everything together, we’re focused on proactively elevating key customer trends and making VoC insights easier for teams to absorb and use, helping product teams prioritize with confidence and move faster on high-impact work.

To everyone who shared ideas, voted, joined conversations, or participated in CAB this past year: thank you! Your voice matters, and it’s shaping the future of Grafana. We look forward to collaborating with you in 2026 and beyond!