Grafana for Business Intelligence: How Grafana Labs Runs on Grafana

Grafana isn't just for SREs. At Grafana Labs, every department — product, sales, marketing, engineering — runs on Grafana as their BI tool. In this GrafanaCON 2026 session, Chris (head of central data & analytics) and Sam Jewell (software engineer, semantic layer) show exactly how they've built it, with live demos using their real dashboard schemas on synthetic data available at play.grafana.com.

Chris opens with the "why": fewer tools means less complexity and cross-department collaboration in a single shared environment, with the added benefit of dogfooding Grafana's own capabilities in a demanding, non-observability context.

The product analytics section covers the Kubernetes monitoring adoption funnel — four stages from awareness to aha moment, powered by BigQuery, with annotations auto-generated from A/B test event data (no analyst required). A live demo shows Grafana Assistant running a two-proportion Z-test for statistical significance directly against BigQuery, replacing what would typically be a specialized analytics tool or analyst request. Chris also shows how adding Grafana Assistant to Slack channels — where it can access both dashboards and conversation threads — became an inflection point for how the data team operates day-to-day.

The sales analytics section demos the pipeline dashboard built by the RevOps team for sellers and SDRs: hundreds of thousands of Salesforce records, 100+ columns per row, aggregated into a single pipeline view with 15 filter dimensions. Execs use it to track regional performance; individual sellers use it to identify which accounts to call that day.

Sam then demos the semantic layer — built on Cube (open-source, self-hostable) — showing three concrete improvements over raw SQL dashboards: (1) click-to-filter that works across the entire dashboard without breaking CTEs or subqueries, (2) building panels with 4 point-and-click selections instead of 30 lines of SQL, and (3) giving the Grafana Assistant a single source of truth for business metric definitions (like ARR) so it makes fewer, faster, more accurate queries instead of hallucinating table structures. The data source plugin is free and open source on GitHub.

00:00 Why Grafana Labs Uses Grafana for Business Intelligence
00:03:52 Product Analytics: Kubernetes Adoption Funnel (Demo)
00:06:17 A/B Testing Measurement + Grafana Assistant
00:08:33 Grafana Assistant in Slack
00:09:48 Sales Analytics: Salesforce Pipeline Dashboard (Demo)
00:12:46 Semantic Layer: What It Is and Why It Matters
00:13:33 Click-to-Filter Across Dashboards (Demo)
00:14:17 Build Panels Without Writing SQL (Demo)
00:17:54 Semantic Layer + AI: Fewer Hallucinations, Better Queries

Links/resources:
Check out Grafana Play: https://www.play.grafana.org
Get started with the Grafana Cloud forever-free tier: https://grafana.com/g/cloud
Have a question? Ask Grot, your AI helper: https://grafana.com/grot/
Reach out in our community forums: https://gra.fan/communityyf

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