Grafana Labs expands its open source observability community in Japan

Whether it’s attending community meetups, developing new data sources, or even landing on the moon, the open source observability community in Japan has been an integral part of the larger Grafana community.

And with our latest regional expansion, we’re excited to see what more the community can achieve. We recently added a Grafana Cloud region in Tokyo as well as hosted two local meetups — one featuring JAXA and its successful lunar landing using Grafana and another highlighting the visualization of 130 factories worldwide at DENSO. Each meetup welcomed more than 100 observability experts and enthusiasts to help foster learning, sharing, and networking within the local open source observability community. The meetups were also streamed online, with hundreds of participants joining in real-time.We’ve also updated our website to include resources in Japanese for the community.

This work aligns with our mission to make Grafana easy to use, no matter where your data (or our users) live. While the magic of open source is that our universal language is code, we are always working on ways to extend our global community, which now has more than 20 million users, and meet them where we are.

But in the end, our real superpower lies in the powerful connections that are made within the open source Grafana community. “Every time I have a question or an idea I’ve never tried or Grafana has never tried, we always want to try it together,” says Mikhail Volkov, CEO and founder of Volkov Labs and a longtime Grafana contributor. “You can do whatever you want with Grafana with the help of the community.”

When the Grafana community wanted an Amazon CloudWatch data source, it was a community member who responded in 2015. “This was my first time contributing to a big OSS like Grafana,” says Mitsuhiro Tanda, Lead Engineer at GREE, Inc. “The community came together and talked about it together. It was very nice to have built something up together. This is a very Grafana-like way of being a community.”

And it has remained that way for more than a decade. When Satoshi Nakahira implemented Grafana into JAXA’s systems to help Japan become the fifth country to land on the moon, “We were able to build our entire system quite easily and the visualization capability was broad from simple to detailed graphs. We were also able to create dashboards that were well-received and visually impressive,” says Satoshi, whose GrafanaCON session is available to watch on demand. “Thank you very much to the Grafana community.”