Blog

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

Here's a look at how we toasted our 5th birthday with team gatherings around the globe.

New Grafana Labs team member Ivana Huckova shares why working remotely as a junior dev can be a good idea.

To commemorate our 5th birthday, we’ve put together the history of Grafana Labs.

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?

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.

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.