Grafana 12, from the founder’s perspective: design, scale, and the next chapter
Sometimes the most interesting engineering stories don’t start with a roadmap or a release plan—they start with personal taste. A preference for good design. A frustration with clunky tools. A desire to see everything in one place.
In this episode of "Grafana’s Big Tent," hosts Mat Ryer, Principal Software Engineer at Grafana Labs, and Tom Wilkie, CTO at Grafana Labs, sit down with Torkel Ödegaard, founder of Grafana, and Ryan McKinley, Distinguished Engineer at Grafana Labs, for a wide-ranging conversation about Grafana’s origin, its evolution over 12 major releases, and the architectural foundations behind Grafana 12.
Along the way, the group covers why Grafana’s UI mattered from Day One, how the platform expanded beyond traditional observability, what it takes to maintain a 12-year-old open source codebase, and how new schema-first APIs, dashboards-as-code, and dynamic layouts are setting Grafana up for the next decade.
You can watch the full episode in the YouTube video below, or listen on Spotify or Apple Podcasts.
(Note: The following are highlights from episode 5, season 3 of “Grafana’s Big Tent” podcast. This transcript has been edited for length and clarity.)
Setting the stage: how Grafana began—and what it was originally for
Torkel Ödegaard: It started with application-level metrics. I really wanted to get insight into a microservices system I was building and simple stuff, like performance and queue, how the messages were being processed and what the queue depths were. But then quickly we started using it for business-level metrics as well. The thing that I really fell in love with is being able to correlate. This was an auction site, [so] being able to see the amount of user bids and the value, how many people logged in, and correlate that with their performance. Or if you changed something on the site, being able to see the real-time impact on the business of a code change, a performance change, or an outage.
Why design mattered, and why 'looking cool' wasn’t an accident
Torkel: Yeah, I think, funnily enough, the thing that sold it the most was actually ease of use and looking cool … compared to most other kinds of observability metrics tools that had small image-based graphs that you couldn't really interact with, but were really time-consuming to set up and very limiting.
Just being able to have these colorful dashboards that were relatively easy for anyone to create and looking good enough so you really wanted to have them on a TV—that's the thing that really made it so that everyone, every team in the company walking past or seeing other teams' dashboards [would say] “Oh, I want this too,” because it just looked cool and was relatively easy for them to do that.
12 releases later: maintaining Grafana at massive scale
Torkel: Before I started Grafana, I think the longest I had been working at a single company or project or product was maybe two and a half years. So yeah, starting something that I would be working on 12 years later was very far from my mind.
Mat Ryer: [It] must be rewarding working on a piece of software that's reached so many people, right? Like, I definitely don't think I've ever worked on a piece of software that's been used so widely in the industry.
Torkel: Yeah, I think the latest number is anywhere from 25 [million] to 50 million, depending on how we count active users and not active users, but it's, I think the sense is, it's a lot.
The one thing behind Grafana’s growth
Tom Wilkie: If you could put your finger on, like one thing in Grafana that's led to this level of usage and the growth and the engagement that we have for the community, what would it be? Leading question, I kind of know what I think it is.
Ryan McKinley: For me, it's that it looks good and allows you to extend to whatever your systems happen to be. And we all know those change over time. So that's part of our pluggable open framework where this started off driven entirely by Graphite. Graphite was super important, but over time Prometheus became more important. And we're seeing new data sources pop up, new ways of visualizing stuff, who puts their data in which sources. Currently, we support about 200 or so different sources of data, which kind of allows teams to work with their data wherever it is.
Git sync, governance, and safer dashboard workflows
Tom: What are the improvements in Grafana 12? In our 12th release?
Ryan: There's a lot. And there's a lot under the surface, but for me, the most important foundational shift that we've got is really a look at our API structures and how we're going to improve things over time. So dashboards as code, we've talked about forever, we've tried it forever. We are now taking a kind of schema-first approach, a consistent API to all of the things that you read and write out of Grafana. So dashboards being the key one.
We have a Git sync project that's gone on for years, but has been hindered by not having a schema-first approach. But this lets you essentially configure Grafana so that when reading and writing dashboards we're actually reading and writing them to external static repositories that can have your own version tracking and governance for how those get deployed out.
Tom: I'm really excited about this feature. In particular—and I'm sure many of our listeners have experienced this themselves—we've got some Grafana instances with like 100 copies of the same dashboard because you go in and you just want to tweak that one thing, but you don't want to break the dashboard, so you create a copy and you tweak it in your copy, right?
Looking ahead: foundations for the next decade
Tom: Can you tell us anything—sneak peeks about what's next or what's coming up? Can people just go to the repo and just find out all by themselves because it's open source?
Torkel: It's all open source, so yeah, you could see. But I mean, I feel like we've hinted at it already. A lot of what we're doing has been really laying the foundation for what we're building. So we have our "version one" of the dashboards API that essentially maps to what you've already seen. Clearly, the new schema for "version two" and for how we will have declarative resources for all of the objects that you manipulate within Grafana is really the stuff I'm most excited about and that work just continues along the train of migrating our bespoke APIs into a common structure. So that's the biggest thing occupying our teams at the moment.
Ryan: There are multiple things that interest me where I could see myself thinking more about how AI will fit into building dashboards or other workflows.
And another thing is where do we take the new themes or the look and feel of Grafana? Grafana has, in general, looked very similar for the last eight years. How do we push that to the next level and these new things, given AI and these new assistants, that could warrant a rethink for the rest of the UI in terms of how we structure it and how we think about workflows. But yeah, it's a little bit of an open field there, in terms of, at least for me, what's the next beyond?
And I think another thing that is big in terms of Grafana as a whole is working towards true multi-tenancy and breaking it up and making it easier to operate at scale. And that's at least something we care a lot about, but I think it's going to have an impact for open source users as well, potentially making Grafana a little bit more composable for different scenarios.
Tom: Yeah, we're running tens of thousands of Grafana instances in Grafana Cloud, and moving that towards a more scalable multi-tenant microservices architecture is our long-term goal. I think we could do a whole episode just on how we're doing that.
Torkel: I suspect we'll do a few.
“Grafana’s Big Tent” podcast wants to hear from you. If you have a great story to share, want to join the conversation, or have any feedback, please contact the Big Tent team at bigtent@grafana.com.
