Grafana

About

Grafana

Grafana is an open-source analytics and monitoring dashboard application originally forked from Kibana 3 in 2013 by Swedish developer Torkel Ödegaard. Grafana Labs, the commercial company built around the project, was co-founded in 2014 with Raj Dutt as chief executive officer, and offers Grafana Cloud and Grafana Enterprise commercial products above the free open-source core. The application specialises in dashboards for time-series metrics, logs, and traces.

Grafana was created in 2013 by Torkel Ödegaard, a Swedish developer who forked the open-source Kibana 3 codebase and rebuilt it around time-series metrics and a pluggable data-source model. The initial release rapidly became the default dashboarding tool paired with Graphite and later Prometheus, and in 2014 Ödegaard co-founded Grafana Labs alongside Anthony Woods and Raj Dutt to build a commercial company around the project. Dutt continues as chief executive of Grafana Labs, and the company operates out of New York City with global engineering across Europe, North America, and Asia. Grafana Labs has raised more than four hundred million dollars across multiple venture rounds while continuing to steward Grafana, Grafana Loki for logs, Grafana Tempo for traces, and Grafana Mimir for scalable metrics storage under permissive open-source licenses. The Grafana dashboard application is designed around composable panels backed by pluggable data sources. Native data-source plugins cover Prometheus, InfluxDB, Elasticsearch, Loki, Tempo, PostgreSQL, MySQL, CloudWatch, Azure Monitor, Google Cloud Monitoring, Grafana Enterprise data lakes, and dozens of others through the plugin catalogue. Panels include time-series graphs, gauges, stat single-values, tables, heatmaps, geomaps, node graphs, histograms, and full-text log and trace views. Alerting fires when metric thresholds are breached, and unified alerting integrates with PagerDuty, Slack, Opsgenie, Microsoft Teams, and generic webhooks. Grafana is distributed free from grafana.com as binary packages, Docker images, and a Helm chart, and licensed under the AGPLv3 open-source license following a 2021 relicensing move. Grafana Cloud offers a hosted managed service with a generous free tier and paid Pro and Advanced plans, and Grafana Enterprise adds commercial features and support on top of the self-hosted binary. Community channels include the community.grafana.com forum, the Grafana OSS Slack workspace, the grafana GitHub organization, and the annual GrafanaCON user conference.