Grafana

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. It is expandable through a plug-in system. Complex monitoring dashboards 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.

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

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.

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

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.

Grafana Labs acquired Kausal in 2018, k6 in 2021, and Asserts.ai in 2023.

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

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

Since 2021, Grafana has been licensed under an AGPLv3 license. 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.

Microsoft Azure Managed Grafana 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
 * Grafana Mimir - a Prometheus-compatible, scalable metrics storage and analysis tool released in 2022 that replaced Cortex
 * Grafana Tempo - a distributed tracing tool, released in 2021
 * Grafana Pyroscope - a continuous profiling tool, released in 2023