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Grafana Labs just raised $24 million. Here’s what that means for our open source community.

Parts One and Two of this blog looked back at the ongoing open source licensing wars, focusing on the evolving situation between Elastic N.V. and AWS. In the last installment, Raj Dutt discusses how Grafana Labs is reacting.

Where we left off: AWS had taken the Elasticsearch software and launched their own cloud offering in 2015, and Elastic N.V. had doubled down on an 'open core strategy.'

The emergence of a new breed of commercial open source company, challenging the dominance of public cloud, has set off a licensing war that calls into question the very meaning of open source.

Grafana Launches Microsoft Azure Data Source Microsoft is a whole new company. Way back in college, I remember that they were vehemently anti-Linux, with Steve Ballmer even going so far as to call open source a “cancer”. More recently, I’ve been watching with a sense of astonishment and admiration at some of their moves and announcements. I’ve been particularly impressed with the rise of Azure, and how they’ve come to embrace open source and open standards.

My name is Raj Dutt, and I am the co-founder and CEO of raintank, Inc. As many of you know, raintank is the company behind Grafana, which our co-founder Torkel created as a front-end for Graphite almost 3 years ago. Today, Grafana supports dozens of different time series databases. Overall, we think Graphite is pretty awesome. Originally written by Chris Davis at Orbitz in 2006, it has helped many thousands of companies achieve a quantum leap in how they handled their metrics.

NOTICE: DISCONTINUATION OF SNAP TELEMETRY PROJECT. The Snap Telemetry project will no longer be maintained by Intel. Intel will not provide or guarantee development of or support for Snap, including but not limited to, maintenance, bug fixes, new releases or updates. Patches to this project are no longer accepted by Intel. If you have an ongoing need to use Snap, are interested in independently developing it, or would like to maintain patches for the community, please create your own fork of the project.

Last Thursday was a big day for the raintank team. Not only did we release a beta of Grafana 3.0 and a preview of Grafana.net, but we also announced our partnership with Intel (more on that later). A trifecta. Grafana 3.0 will represent our biggest release ever, with over 1,500 commits from more than 30 developers around the world. Read more about the Grafana 3.0 beta release on the Grafana blog

The snow has arrived in full force here in New York. Our subway authority, the MTA, has stored 31 miles of trains underground. The roads have been closed. The city that never sleeps is in full hibernation. Beating the storm’s arrival by only a few hours, our team from Sweden landed last night. From all corners of the world, almost the entire Grafana Labs team is converging for a week of face-to-face strategizing and development in NYC.

At raintank, all our software is open source. We haven’t talked much about how the whole stack will fit together (more on that soon…), but starting with Grafana, every piece of it is being developed in the open. Our core revenue model is OpenSaaS: We couple our software with optional hosted services that we provide. These services are also powered by software that is open source. Most of our users will simply choose to download our open source software, and won’t pay us anything.

Some of the most fun I had last year was the few weeks I spent in Colorado and Utah, learning how to fly sailplanes. It’s really challenging, especially for pilots who are used to flying with engines. It’s a very raw, yet zen-like experience, and I’m hooked. You have to learn to rely on your senses a lot more than your instruments. The experience has made me think more about parallels between monitoring and aviation, a topic I’ve written before

This fall has been busy, exciting and at times just plain crazy at raintank. We’ve been campaigning on both sides of the Atlantic, spreading the democratize metrics message. The whirlwind kicked off at Velocity East, NYC on Oct 12. Litmus is our first OpenSaaS app for Grafana. If you care about your global performance and availability, you should check it out. A preview was announced at Monitorama in June, and we’ve boarded hundreds of early access users since then.

My co-founder Anthony wrote about our promising initial experiences with InfluxDB a few months ago. We’re bullish on InfluxDB, but it’ll probably take a little while for Paul and his burgeoning team to reach a production-worthy release, especially when you consider that 0.9 is a ground-up rewrite. Another promising database that we’ve been taking a hard look at in the last few weeks is KairosDB, which is a fork of OpenTSDB, but using Cassandra instead of HBase.

The only constant is change. The cliche is perhaps especially true when considering the open source infrastructure software landscape. Fifteen years ago, it was common to find CIOs who had a “no open-source in my enterprise!” attitude. Serious businesses chose Sun Microsystems or Microsoft. Linux was for the kids. Microsoft even went so far as to call it a cancer That seems crazy today. It’s an awesome time to be an open-source company.

It started as a crazy idea, but as some crazy ideas do, it became less crazy over time. My co-founder Anthony has been really concerned about design and UI since day zero of raintank. He firmly believes that our “frontend” will make or break us, and that it’s often a differentiator that commercial products lord over open source alternatives. My other co-founder Torkel shares the sentiment; he’s gone out of his way to make Grafana as intuitive and beautiful as possible over the last year, precisely because he thinks it’s so important.

I’m starting to think there’s a lot that the monitoring world can learn from the aviation world, and vice-versa. Those that know me are probably starting to roll their eyes; I really like talking about airplanes. I love flying, especially when I’m the one doing it. I got my private pilots license many years ago, and am in the middle of a glider rating. I wish I had more time to go up.