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Grafana is a multi-platform open source analytics and interactive visualization web application. It can produce charts, graphs, and alerts for the web when connected to supported data sources.

There is also a licensed Grafana Enterprise version with additional capabilities, which is sold as a self-hosted installation or through an account on the Grafana Labs cloud service.[2] It is expandable through a plug-in system. Complex monitoring dashboards[3] can be built by end users, with the aid of interactive query builders. The product is divided into a front end and back end, written in TypeScript and Go, respectively.[4]

As a visualization tool, Grafana can be used as a component in monitoring stacks,[5] often in combination with time series databases such as InfluxDB, Prometheus[6][7] and Graphite;[8] monitoring platforms such as Sensu,[9] Icinga, Checkmk,[10] Zabbix, Netdata,[7] and PRTG; SIEMs such as Elasticsearch,[6] OpenSearch,[11] and Splunk; and other data sources. The Grafana user interface was originally based on version 3 of Kibana.[12]

History

Grafana was first released in 2014 by Torkel Ödegaard as an offshoot of a project at Orbitz. It targeted time series databases such as InfluxDB, OpenTSDB, and Prometheus, but evolved to support relational databases such as MySQL/MariaDB, PostgreSQL and Microsoft SQL Server.[13]

In 2019, Grafana Labs secured $24 million in Series A funding.[14] In the 2020 Series B funding round it obtained $50 million.[15] In the 2021 Labs Series C funding round, Grafana secured $220 million.[16]

A conference, GrafanaCon 2020, scheduled for May 13–14, 2020, in Amsterdam, was changed to an online live streaming event during the COVID-19 pandemic.[17][18]

Grafana Labs acquired Kausal in 2018[19], k6 in 2021[20][21], and Asserts.ai in 2023[22].

Adoption

Grafana is used[5] in Wikimedia's infrastructure.[23] Grafana has over 1000 paying customers, including Bloomberg, JP Morgan Chase, eBay, PayPal, and Sony.[20]

Licensing

Previously, Grafana was licensed with an Apache License 2.0 license and used a CLA based on the Harmony Contributor Agreement.[24]

Since 2021, Grafana has been licensed under an AGPLv3 license.[25] Contributors to Grafana need to sign a Contributor License Agreement (CLA) that gives Grafana Labs the right to relicense Grafana in the future. The CLA is based on The Apache Software Foundation Individual Contributor License Agreement.[26]

Microsoft Azure Managed Grafana[27] is a fully managed service for analytics and monitoring solutions. It's supported by Grafana Enterprise, which provides extensible data visualizations. Quickly and easily deploy Grafana dashboards with built-in high availability and control access with Azure security.

Related Projects

Grafana Labs launched a series of related open-source projects to complement Grafana:

  • Grafana Loki - a log aggregation platform inspired by Prometheus first made available in 2019[28]
  • Grafana Mimir - a Prometheus-compatible, scalable metrics storage and analysis tool released in 2022 that replaced Cortex[29]
  • Grafana Tempo - a distributed tracing tool, released in 2021[30]
  • Grafana Pyroscope - a continuous profiling tool, released in 2023[31]

References

  1. ^ "Release 11.0.0". 14 May 2024. Retrieved 23 May 2024.
  2. ^ "Grafana Enterprise Stack". Grafana Labs. Retrieved 2021-03-19.
  3. ^ Perrin, Jim. "Monitoring Linux performance with Grafana". OpenSource.com. Retrieved 2018-08-14.
  4. ^ Synopsys. "The grafana Open Source Project on Open Hub: Languages Page". Open Hub. Retrieved 2021-03-19.
  5. ^ a b Anadiotis, George. "DevOps and observability in the 2020s". ZDNet. Retrieved 2020-02-04.
  6. ^ a b Jones, Anna (2019-01-25). "Open Source Monitoring Stack: Prometheus and Grafana". Bizety. Retrieved 2019-05-08.
  7. ^ a b DeLosSantos, Louis (2018). "Netdata, Prometheus, Grafana stack". Netdata Documentation. Retrieved 2019-05-08.
  8. ^ Assaraf, Ariel (6 July 2018). "Grafana Vs Graphite". Coralogix.
  9. ^ Kumar, Santhosh; Muruganantham, Logeshkumar (2017-01-21). "Step By Step: Install and Configure Sensu + Grafana". Powerupcloud Tech Blog. Archived from the original on May 8, 2019. Retrieved 2019-05-08.
  10. ^ "Exporting Check_MK Performance Data to Grafana". TruePath Technologies. 2018. Retrieved 2020-09-24.
  11. ^ "OpenSearch plugin for Grafana". Grafana Labs. Retrieved 2024-06-02.
  12. ^ Ödegaard, Torkel (2019-09-03). "The (Mostly) Complete History of Grafana UX". grafana.com. Retrieved 2020-10-06.
  13. ^ "MySQL data source | Grafana documentation". Grafana Labs. Retrieved 2024-04-23.
  14. ^ Anadiotis, George. "Is open source the way to go for observability? Grafana Labs scores $24M Series A funding to try to prove this". ZDNet. Retrieved 2020-02-04.
  15. ^ Grafana (2020-08-17). "Grafana Labs Raises $50 Million to Accelerate R&D Investments in Open Source Logs, Metrics and Composable Observability". GlobeNewswire News Room (Press release). Retrieved 2021-07-23.
  16. ^ Grafana (2021-08-24). "Grafana Labs Raises $220 Million Round at $3 Billion Valuation". Bloomberg. Retrieved 2021-08-22.
  17. ^ "GrafanaCon 2020". Retrieved 2020-05-04.
  18. ^ Dam, Julie (2019-12-12). "Register Now! GrafanaCon 2020 Is Coming to Amsterdam May 13-14". grafana.com.
  19. ^ "Kausal to join Grafana Labs to bring Prometheus to the masses". Kausal.co. 2018-03-10. Retrieved 2024-05-27.
  20. ^ a b "Grafana Labs acquires load-testing startup K6". VentureBeat. 2021-06-17. Retrieved 2021-07-27.
  21. ^ "Grafana Labs Acquires k6 to Add Open Source Load Testing Tool - DevOps.com". devops.com. 17 June 2021. Retrieved 2021-07-27.
  22. ^ "Grafana Labs acquires AI startup Asserts.ai to ease application observability headaches". siliconangle.com. 2023-11-14. Retrieved 2024-06-14.
  23. ^ "grafana.wikimedia.org". Wikitech. Retrieved 2021-04-09.
  24. ^ "Grafana Labs Contributor License Agreement". Retrieved 2021-01-22.
  25. ^ Dutt, Raj (2021-04-20). "Grafana, Loki, and Tempo will be relicensed to AGPLv3". grafana.com. Retrieved 2021-04-21.
  26. ^ "Grafana Labs Contributor License Agreement". grafana.com. 2021-04-20. Retrieved 2021-04-21.
  27. ^ "Azure Managed Grafana | Microsoft Azure".
  28. ^ Lobo, Savia (November 20, 2019). "Grafana Labs announces general availability of Loki 1.0, a multi-tenant log aggregation system". Packt Hub. Retrieved 19 April 2023.
  29. ^ Gain, B. Cameron (August 10, 2022). "The Great Grafana Mimir and Cortex Split". The New Stack. Retrieved 19 April 2023.
  30. ^ Deutscher, Maria (June 8, 2021). "Grafana Labs eases IT monitoring with Tempo tracing tool and new Grafana release". Silicon Angle. Retrieved 19 April 2023.
  31. ^ Vizard, Mike (August 31, 2023). "Grafana Labs Delivers Open Source Code Profiling Tool". DevOps.com. Retrieved 27 May 2024.
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