Blog

Today is a momentous day for the Grafana project and for raintank, the company behind Grafana. We’re rebranding as Grafana Labs, and announcing something we’ve been working on for the better part of a year: GrafanaCloud. First the rebrand The growth and momentum of Grafana, and the popularity of the Grafana brand, has been unbelievable since we started raintank (indeed, accelerating the growth of Grafana is raintank’s #1 mission). As we mentioned at GrafanaCon, we’re tired of saying we are raintank, you know, the company behind Grafana?

At Grafana Labs, we’re building an OpenSaaS monitoring platform around Grafana. We want to create a powerful yet turnkey experience; one that offers the best of both the SaaS and open source worlds. Our sense is that monitoring has gotten too expensive, and creates unnecessary silos. Users have lost control of their data destiny, and are trapped by inflexible solutions and spiraling costs. We think that there’s a better way forward.

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.

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.

I am not sure who coined the term Democratize metrics first, if it was me or Raintank CEO Raj Dutt. Whoever it was does not matter, what does matter is that I really like the term. It resonates with many of the things that I tried to do with Grafana. For me the term can also be associated with a Build, Measure, Learn and DevOps culture where data, be it infrastructure, application or business related, can easily be used and accessed togther by anyone.

On March 1st 2015, we asked the Grafana community for a favor. We published a public survey to solicit feedback on the current state of the product to better understand how Grafana is being used and to weigh in on some new features we were considering. The number and the quality of responses exceeded our expectations. Lots of really useful feedback on what is missing and what could be better.

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.