Grafana, data analytics and interactive visualization

Grafana is a multi-platform, open source web application for data analytics and interactive visualization. It enables the creation of control panels and graphs from multiple sources, including time series databases, hardware equipment, etc. The application is available under AGPL v3 license (GNU’s Affero General Public License, version 3.0). It is supported in the three main operating systems: Microsoft Windows, Linux and MacOS.

Common use cases

Grafana is a tool that offers many features and functionalities. It enables unifying data from different sources and displaying them on a single interface to monitor a wide range of metrics. Therefore, many service providers use it, for instance, to monitor storage arrays and dedicated servers.

This powerful application is commonly used together with:

• Time series databases such as Prometheus, Graphite or InfluxDB.
• Monitoring platforms such as Netdata, Zabbix or Sensu.
• Security Information and Event Management (SIEM) systems such as Elasticsearch or splunk.

History

Its creator, Torkel Ödegaard, published the first version in 2014. Originally, its user interface was based on the version 3 of Kibana — a data visualization dashboard designed for Elasticsearch’s search engine. Regarding programming languages, this data visualization and analytics application currently uses Go for the back-end and TypeScript for the front-end.

Furthermore, it is worth mentioning that Grafana Labs, in charge of the development of this web application, has closed several funding rounds during the past years. A Series B in 2020, a Series C in 2021 and a Series D of 240 million dollars in the first semester of 2022.

Versions

Grafana has two editions: Enterprise and OSS. The application is regularly updated, including both improvements, optimizations and security patches. Here we have collected the main versions of Grafana during the past years.