Grafana champions, Crash course, and new team member as highlights of 2023
Every December, my heart fills with excitement for the following year. At some point in this month, I usually realize it has been another year. While my consciousness reflects on the unavoidable passing of time, my subconsciousness starts to re-count all the fantastic things that happened that year.
The 2023 year was filled with many intriguing, inspiring, and even jaw-dropping events for us at Volkov Labs. In this article, I wanted to share the highlights of 2023 and why we are excited for 2024!
Let's go!
Grafana Champions
Mikhail and I became Grafana Champions this year.
Grafana made a quick announcement about that during the ObservabilityCon in London. Standing on the stage and seeing our names on the backdrop screen was a tremendous accomplishment and recognition.
The thoughtful company swag for champions that was awaiting us at home, made everything real.
In addition, Grafana added our videos to the Community, Innovation, Fun page.
Grafana Crash Course
This fantastic project was never a part of our plan. With me learning Grafana comes a collection of notes about its basics. After some time, I realized that my notes might be helpful to others who were like myself, learning Grafana. Long story short, I transferred everything from my scattered jots into beautiful SVG schemas and articles and posted all that as Grafana Crash Course.
After a couple of refinement cycles, the Grafana Crash course was born. It has already helped so many Grafana enthusiasts that we lost count of the number, somewhere in the hundreds. The crash course contains straight-to-the-point, insightful information that, in many cases, you cannot find anywhere else. I worked on conceptual schemas, term definitions, code examples, and tutorials in this course.
I even created a series for developers where I built a panel plugin demonstrating every step. Any JavaScript Developer can follow my lead and create their first Grafana plugin!
This project reflects our hard work featuring Grafana's unique architectural design, which brings unparalleled flexibility to tackle any real-world task with technical elegance.
The crash course is far from being complete. As always, if you have any ideas about what else should be covered there, contact us and share your thoughts. We are always up for fruitful discussions.
Our plugins are always compatible with the latest Grafana versions
That takes time, intelligent scheduling, quick wit, and deep knowledge to keep all our plugins compatible with the latest Grafana versions all the time. We are proud to be able to keep up and ensure the best results for the community.
Our YouTube channel reached the mark of 2,140 subscribers
We started this year with 340 subscribers, which was, we believed, quite a significant number for such a narrow technical niche we chose. However, as the year went on and more and more people showed their support, we realized that we were just scratching the surface.
340 people subscribed to our channel in the first year and then another ~1,800 hoped on board during the second year. We are grateful to everyone, no matter how you show your support, whether by subscribing, commenting, sharing, becoming a member, using Big Thanks, sponsoring, or referencing our work on your resources. All that together makes a beautiful notification buzz noise, which, if you listen closely, has a resemblance to the Jungle Bell song! Thank you all for spreading the Holiday spirit.
With humble hearts, we are pleased to report that no one expressed anything negative for the last two years of Volkov Labs being present online. This is another reason to admire the Grafana community, like-minded people who focus on solutions that make the lives of thousands easier.
Grafana Documentary
In Stockholm, Sweden, Mikhail was interviewed for the second episode of the 10th-anniversary documentaries, where he mentioned our beloved Apache ECharts (Business Charts) panel as his favorite Community plugin.
Our team expanded
Alex Simonok joining our team signifies a new chapter of our company. His solid technical background and unique ability to solve challenging problems exceed expectations. Our Director of Engineering is here to stay and introduce the best of all worlds in our upcoming BI(G) project!
The BI(G) idea
BI(G) stands for Business Intelligence in Grafana. At the time of this article, it contains the Alerting panel and BI Alert Engine. We add the breakthrough features weekly (watch our blog for updates). The plan is to grow the BI(G) as big as possible into a fully standalone Business Intelligence Application with forecasting and AI.
The idea of the BI(G) project rushed into our hungry for fresh ideas minds in September of 2023. Previously, we had to work on projects with hundreds of alerts, trying to streamline the management for the end-users. Our users often focus on the business side of the processes where their deep expertise is. They lacked the time to comprehend all the technical Grafana intricacies and needed a lot of guidance.
The idea of the BI(G) was born from a bare necessity to simplify everyday work for data analysts and project managers with profound expertise in their subject area but not in the Grafana.
Overall, this project is a quintessential result of our knowledge and experience and is, indeed, the most indicative achievement of Volkov Labs thus far.
Conclusion, but not really
We are not ready to conclude. We are just beginning. The upcoming year has a lot for us in store. I am buckled up and ready!
Indeed, I am looking forward with a fast-beating heart to sitting down at the end of 2024 and writing another article with a big smile, more hopes, more plans, and the feeling of outstanding accomplishments!
Happy Holidays, and may you find peace and happiness!
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