Golden Grot Winner and Master Educator award, Business Suite, and Business Studio as highlights of 2024
The year 2024 was full of surprises, and we are quite happy to look back at everything that happened at Volkov Labs over the last 12 months.
Many goals are achieved, and many more are set for 2025. We are excited, enthusiastic, hopeful, and, most importantly, thankful to be a part of such a vibrant community.
Before the next year begins, finding a quiet day or two and reflecting on everything that happened feels natural, satisfying and helpful. I invite you to take a breath with me and enjoy the moment before moving forward into 2025.
If today is that quiet day then join me, sit comfortably in your chair, pour something delightful into your cup, and let's savor all the beautiful things of 2024 together.
Let's go!
Golden Grot Winner award
We have been working with Theia Scientific and Chris Fields for almost three years. The project helps many nuclear scientists around the US swiftly and effectively determine the material quality under the microscope.
This year, the dashboard we collaborated on has been awarded the Golden Grot. There are only two dashboard Golden Grot award winners a year: one in the personal and another in the professional categories.
Chris generously shared the award with us for a photo op. The award itself is quite hefty and made of glassy material. It is chic and festive-looking.
Master Educator award
In December, Mikhail and I were honored with the Master Educator Grafana Champions Award. This award is a testament to the champions' consistent production of high-quality educational content, such as blog posts, tutorials, and video guides. These resources are instrumental in unlocking the full potential of Grafana. They provide valuable insights and accessible learning materials which is a key factor in fostering Grafana's growth and adoption.
I wish you can watch the online ceremony, it was a blast. Two feelings I experienced right after:
- Grafana is doing an outstanding job with the championship program.
- Community recognition feels special and, most importantly, inspiring. We already have a packed roadmap for the next year! Stay tuned for more products, ideas, solutions and tutorials from us!
New team member
At the beginning of 2024, Vitali came on board as a helper and, in the blink of an eye, became the savior of the day when it comes to managing surging community requests. We are glad he joined us. The Grafana Community needs to know the name of a hero who is in constant battle with the number of open issues. His commitment can not be praised enough. Thank you, Vitali, for your hard work and patience. It is an incredible pleasure to work with you.
We are growing and another team member join us in 2025!
Business Suite
It took almost three years for the idea of the Business Suite to form properly. We started by creating plugins to close the existing functionality gaps for our clients. We ended up with a comprehensive open-source plugin collection with 29 million downloads.
We follow our plugin statistics closely using the Release dashboard projects. You can find detailed guidance how that dashboard was configured in the blog post or watch more comprehensive video on our YouTube channel.
The fact that our plugins, if combined, provide wholesome solutions for long-standing tasks, no doubt, helped the growing popularity. Tasks such as:
- File upload,
- Date-picker,
- Dashboard switching,
- Device management,
- and many more.
You can read more about the Business Suite plugins and possible beneficial combinations in the blog post Business Suite for Grafana. How it all came together and where we move from here published in August 2024.
Another outlook at the Business Suite found its place in the Grafana's blog post Convert your dashboards into comprehensive web applications with the Business Suite for Grafana published in September 2024.
The Business Suite is a fine roundup of the software development achievements we are proud of accomplishing in 2024. We keep the official Business Suite documentation is up-to-date with the latest developments.
You can find what each plugin can do for you, along with plenty of examples, ideas, and ready-to-use solutions.
Business Table
Oh yeah, that one plugin that swept of their feet many of the community members. The first release was published in September and since then the number of open issues on GitHub almost never comes down, no matter how hard we try to beat it.
The popularity is off the charts. The last plugin to join our Business Suite has all potential to become the most popular one for two simple reasons:
- the flexible table layouts of data visualization including Tree View and nested objectes
- ability to send data back into the data source via the add and delete a row functionality.
The last time I checked this plugin allowed to configure 7(!) data flows:
-
Three for the general data:
- Add data,
- Edit data,
- Delete data.
-
And four more for the nested objects data:
- Get options,
- Add options,
- Edit options,
- Delete options.
Each of these:
- can work with a data source specified as a variable,
- has permission configuration based on roles or query data.
Business Studio public review release
The cherry on top of 2024 was undoubtedly the first public preview release of the Business Studio.
Business Intelligence platform is designed to cater to your needs while working with multiple Grafana instances simultaneously. In the released version, you can create alert rules and actions and review the alert statuses on as many Grafana instances as you require. The Business Studio is here to simplify alert-driven analytics for business users considerably.
You can download installers for MacOS, Linux and Windows from Release Notes.
For a deeper dive into the Business Studio 2.2.0 and its features, check out our comprehensive blog post:
YouTube channel reached 3,700 subscribers
The steady community interests confirmed by the number of daily views indicates we are still on the right track. Thank each and every one of our wonderful subscribers. The next video will be #100! Wow. That is something to celebrate on its own. But not yet though. Let's wait for the next year.
We uploaded 33 videos and got 324 comments and 918 shares. What an engaged audience we are working for! We appreciate your support.
Our plugins are always compatible with the latest Grafana versions
All our Business Suite plugins are compatible with the Scenes-powered dashboards released with Grafana 11.3. Please do not ask how we keep up with all the latest Grafana updates; it is the company secret. Be rest assured, we know how it is done and will continue on this path.
To sum up
Before writing this article, I went back to the last year highlights. There, in conclusion, I said:
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!
To my delight, it all is happening exactly how I wrote a year ago. Amazing! I am indeed more hopeful, our plans are head spinning and, yes, 2024 was grand. Let's repeat the same at the end of 2025.
Stay tuned, keep creating with us, so much more to come!
It is indeed most wonderful time of year. May your hearts fill with joy and hope for the future.
Always happy to hear from you
- Subscribe to our YouTube Channel and leave your comments.
- Become a Business Suite sponsor.
