Grafana was created by Torkel Ödegaard and Marcus Efraimsson in 2013. The project started as a fork of Kibana, modified to work with Graphite instead of Elasticsearch. The founders wanted to create a better dashboard and visualization tool for time-series data.
The name “Grafana” comes from the Swedish word “graf” (graph) combined with a suffix suggesting a platform or tool.
- Funded via Kickstarter campaign (raised $47,589 from 318 backers)
- Initial release focused on Graphite dashboards
- First open-source release
¶ 2014-2015 - Growth and InfluxDB
- Added InfluxDB support
- Grafana Labs founded as a company
- Grafana 2.0 with major architectural improvements
- Grafana 3.0 with alerting
- Grafana 4.0 with mixed data sources
- Introduction of Grafana Cloud
- Support for Prometheus, Loki (logs), and Tempo (traces)
- Grafana 6.0 with unified observability vision
- Enterprise edition launched
¶ 2020-Present - Industry Standard
- Grafana 7.0+ with plugin ecosystem
- Acquisition of Cortex (multi-tenant Prometheus)
- Grafana 8.0+ with enhanced alerting and collaboration
- Grafana 9.0+ with improved scalability
- v1-v2: Angular.js frontend, Graphite-focused
- v3-v4: TypeScript migration, multi-datasource
- v5-v6: React components, plugin system
- v7+: Modern architecture, microservices-ready
- Started with Graphite only
- Now supports 50+ data sources
- Custom data source plugins possible
- 2013-2020: Apache License 2.0
- 2021-Present: AGPL-3.0 (to prevent cloud provider exploitation)
The license change was made in response to cloud providers offering Grafana as a service without contributing to the project.
Grafana is actively developed and maintained:
- Regular releases (monthly feature releases)
- Large engineering team at Grafana Labs
- Active plugin ecosystem
- Strong community support
| Version |
Year |
Notable Features |
| 1.0 |
2014 |
Initial release, Graphite only |
| 2.0 |
2015 |
InfluxDB support, improved UI |
| 3.0 |
2016 |
Alerting, annotations |
| 4.0 |
2017 |
Mixed data sources, table panels |
| 5.0 |
2018 |
Loki integration, improved performance |
| 6.0 |
2019 |
Unified alerting, enterprise features |
| 7.0 |
2020 |
Plugin improvements, new visualizations |
| 8.0 |
2021 |
Alerting overhaul, AGPL license |
| 9.0 |
2022 |
Scalability improvements |
| 10.0+ |
2023+ |
AI features, enhanced collaboration |
Founded in 2015, Grafana Labs has grown to:
- 500+ employees
- Offices in New York, Stockholm, and remote
- Products: Grafana Cloud, Grafana Enterprise, Loki, Tempo, Mimir
Grafana now represents three pillars of observability:
- Metrics: Grafana + Prometheus/Graphite/InfluxDB
- Logs: Loki
- Traces: Tempo
Any questions?
Feel free to contact us. Find all contact information on our contact page.