Grafana Labs has been collaborating with Elastic to enhance the Elasticsearch plugin for Grafana, aiming to support data sources favored by users, such as Elasticsearch. This partnership began even before its official announcement, with both teams working together on a shared roadmap to improve the plugin's reliability and performance. Key developments include the complete rewrite of the Elasticsearch query editor using React and the addition of features in Grafana 8.1, such as support for searching frozen indices and rate aggregation, allowing for more efficient data analysis. The collaboration has also led to various fixes and improvements, with future plans focusing on enhancing user experience through features like syntax highlighting, SQL support, and advanced observability use cases. The teams are committed to continuing their partnership to better integrate Elasticsearch with Grafana, benefiting from contributions and feedback from key individuals in the project.