VolkovLabs has provided what I consider the best and most versatile plugins for Grafana through their “Business Suite” - Calendar, Variable, Table, Text, Charts, and more. These plugins are a cornerstone for many of us, effectively transforming Grafana into a BI tool capable of almost any use case.
Your linked post has some answers for your questions already:
We will no longer release new features, updates, or compatibility patches for the Business Suite plugins.
The Business Suite repositories will remain accessible on GitHub under their current licenses.
I think users don’t understand the risk, when they are using 3rd party plugins. Specifically, that the vendors might abandon plugin/support at any time and for any reason.
To ensure continuity for the Grafana community after the recent update from Volkov Labs, Grafana Labs plans to take over the maintenance of the Business Suite plugins. Our goals are:
To develop timely compatibility updates
To provide a clear path for community contributions
We’ll share our plan for plugins, repos, and timelines soon. Thank you for your patience. And we want to thank the entire Volkov Labs team for years of community contributions.
This does sound promising, but I’m curious — is this genuinely going to move forward? Grafana has previously announced support for plugins that didn’t really progress. The Tour plugin, for instance, hasn’t been updated since 2021, yet it’s still listed as a Grafana-supported plugin.
Most of our dashboards rely heavily on Volkov Labs plugins, and honestly, a lot of the functionality they offer — like more flexible table customisation — feels like it should be built into Grafana natively by now.
If this initiative is going to be properly supported, that’s great news and we’re keen to see it happen. But I’d really appreciate some clarity: if this is going to take years to materialise, we’ll need to rethink things and start building custom portals for each use case rather than waiting on something that may not land.
To be perfectly honest: we’re discussing details internally right now. There will be a post put out as soon as we can get all of the details together which I’m hoping will cover many questions. This requires a lot of work from colleagues and so sometimes we’ll delay a few days to try to get it right. Once that post comes out, we’re still going to be open for Q&A & feedback as always.
Please consider discussing incentives for OSS custom plugin development in general. Plugin store for extended versions maybe? Reddit - The heart of the internet
It was just a matter of time but not surprising as GRAFANA is an ideal platform to develop products and get users to debug, provide additonal features etc and thus serve as a source of free devlopment ideas debugging etc with the intention of seeking a downstream buyout as it the case here.
So either it is a case of moving to, pay for use,o r buyout which ever serves best and I have seen this happen in several instances many not related to GRAFANA. In all cases MONEY TALKS?
