Grafana is a

multi-platform In computing, cross-platform software (also called multi-platform software, platform-agnostic software, or platform-independent software) is computer software that is designed to work in several computing platforms. Some cross-platform software ...

open source Open source is source code that is made freely available for possible modification and redistribution. Products include permission to use the source code, design documents, or content of the product. The open-source model is a decentralized sof ...

analytics and

interactive visualization Visualization or visualisation (see spelling differences) is any technique for creating images, diagrams, or animations to communicate a message. Visualization through visual imagery has been an effective way to communicate both abstract and c ...

web application. It provides charts, graphs, and alerts for the web when connected to supported data sources. A licensed Grafana Enterprise version with additional capabilities is also available as a self-hosted installation or an account on the Grafana Labs cloud service. It is expandable through a plug-in system. End users can create complex monitoring dashboards using interactive query builders. Grafana is divided into a front end and back end, written in TypeScript and Go, respectively. As a visualization tool, Grafana is a popular component in monitoring stacks, often used in combination with time series databases such as

InfluxDB InfluxDB is an open-source time series database (TSDB) developed by the company InfluxData. It is written in the Go programming language for storage and retrieval of time series data in fields such as operations monitoring, application metr ...

, Prometheus and Graphite; monitoring platforms such as Sensu,

Icinga Icinga is an open-source computer system and network monitoring application. It was originally created as a fork of the Nagios system monitoring application in 2009. Icinga is working to improve the Nagios' development process, as well as addin ...

, Checkmk,

Zabbix Zabbix is an open-source software tool to monitor IT infrastructure such as networks Network, networking and networked may refer to: Science and technology * Network theory, the study of graphs as a representation of relations between discre ...

Netdata Netdata is an open source tool designed to collect real-time metrics, such as CPU usage, disk activity, bandwidth usage, website visits, etc., and then display them in live, easy-to-interpret charts. The tool is designed to visualize activity ...

, and

PRTG PRTG (''Paessler Router Traffic Grapher'' until version 7) is an agentless network monitoring software from Paessler AG. Several software versions are combined under the umbrella term ''Paessler PRTG.'' It can monitor and classify system condit ...

; SIEMs such as Elasticsearch and Splunk; and other data sources. The Grafana user interface was originally based on version 3 of

Kibana Kibana is a source-available data visualization dashboard software for Elasticsearch, whose free and open source successor in OpenSearch is OpenSearch Dashboards. History It provides visualization capabilities on top of the content indexed o ...

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

, OpenTSDB, and Prometheus, but evolved to support

relational database A relational database is a (most commonly digital) database based on the relational model of data, as proposed by E. F. Codd in 1970. A system used to maintain relational databases is a relational database management system (RDBMS). Many relatio ...

s such as MySQL,

PostgreSQL PostgreSQL (, ), also known as Postgres, is a free and open-source relational database management system (RDBMS) emphasizing extensibility and SQL compliance. It was originally named POSTGRES, referring to its origins as a successor to the In ...

and Microsoft SQL Server. In 2019, Grafana Labs secured $24 million in Series A funding. In 2020 Series B funding round: $50 million. The conference ''GrafanaCon 2020'' was scheduled for May 13–14, 2020, in Amsterdam, but was changed to a two-day online live streaming event due to the COVID-19 pandemic. Grafana acquired k6 in 2021. In 2021, Grafana Labs secured a Series C funding round of $220 million.

Adoption

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

Licensing

As of April 20, 2021, Grafana is 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 The Apache Software Foundation (ASF) is an American nonprofit corporation (classified as a 501(c)(3) organization in the United States) to support a number of open source software projects. The ASF was formed from a group of developers of the Ap ...

Individual Contributor License Agreement. Previously, Grafana was licensed with an ALv2 license and used a CLA based on the Harmony Contributor Agreement.

References

{{reflist Free and open-source software Projects established in 2014 System monitors Management systems Free network management software 2014 software Software using the GNU AGPL license