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Watch Grafana Labs CEO, Co-founder Raj Dutt discuss why companies need observability

Watch Grafana Labs CEO, Co-founder Raj Dutt discuss why companies need observability

November 1, 2022 3 min

Grafana Labs CEO and Co-founder Raj Dutt sat down with “NYSE Floor Talk” ahead of ObservabilityCON to discuss why companies are increasingly focused on observability as a means to improve customer satisfaction. 

In his conversation with Judy Khan Shaw, host of “NYSE Floor Talk,” Dutt also talked about Grafana Labs’ big tent philosophy and the growth of Grafana Labs and the Grafana open source community. Plus, he gave a sneak peek into what to expect from ObservabilityCON. Watch the entire interview below, or continue reading for a recap of what he had to say.

On the need for observability

We’re all depending on our cell phones for all sorts of services, whether it’s telemedicine or ordering a car or food. The experience and the quality of that experience is of paramount importance to everybody. So, companies really care that they’re online, that their applications are performing fast, that their users aren’t getting annoyed and switching to a competitor. So making sure that all this software and infrastructure is running properly is top of mind for every company.

On Grafana Labs’ big tent philosophy

We prioritize interoperability with the wider ecosystem. So most companies in the observability space, they require you to send all your data to their platform to make use of it. We believe that data is everywhere and our customers have many vendors, many databases, many teams using different technologies.

Our big tent philosophy is about allowing our customers to own their observability journey — make their own choices, choose their own vendors, choose their own technologies, and Grafana will help you understand your systems no matter where you data lives without having to consolidate everything into a single database.

A picture of Grafana Labs CEO and Co-founder Raj Dutt talking with Judy Khan Shaw, host of NYSE Floor Talk.
Grafana Labs CEO and Co-founder Raj Dutt, left, talks with Judy Khan Shaw, host of NYSE Floor Talk.

On the growth of Grafana

The Grafana open source project that my cofounder [Torkel Ödegaard] created in 2014 has seen incredible growth. There are almost a million installations of Grafana around the world, and many, many millions of active users. We have over 2,000 customers who are paying us for our software but the community is much much larger than our customer base, and so that’s what’s growing really fast and the adoption of the software is the most exciting thing.

On ObservabilityCON

It’s great to be here in New York in person. It’s the first time we’ve done this — getting people together — since COVID. We have some great customers who are attending to share their own stories about how they’re using our software and solving real problems. Customers like JPMorgan, Banco Itaú, Wells Fargo, Adobe. So [I’m] really looking forward to hearing from them and meeting our users, our community. 

And finally, we’re launching two brand new open source projects during the conference and that’s always exciting. The team’s been innovating a lot the last few quarters… so we’re really looking forward to all of that.

Want to find out about all the latest and greatest in observability from Grafana Labs? Sign up for the livestream of the keynote at ObservabilityCON now!