Grafana

Stands for: Torkel Ödegaard's open source dashboard of January 2014, the front end to everyone else's telemetry

The open source analytics and visualisation application Torkel Ödegaard released in January 2014, which draws dashboards over other systems' metrics, logs and traces without storing them itself; the product of Grafana Labs and the face of the LGTM observability stack.

Grafana connects to time-series databases and other data sources and lets a user build dashboards that display metrics, logs and traces; it stores none of that telemetry itself, querying the backends when a dashboard renders and combining several sources in one panel, and keeps only dashboards, users, annotations and alert state in a small database of its own. Core data sources include Prometheus, Graphite, InfluxDB and OpenTSDB for metrics, Loki and Elasticsearch for logs, Tempo, Jaeger and Zipkin for traces, Pyroscope for profiles and MySQL, PostgreSQL and SQL Server. Torkel Ödegaard created it in December 2013, by Grafana Labs' account, and released it in January 2014 as an outgrowth of work on Graphite at Orbitz, with a user interface originally based on version 3 of Kibana; the name combines Graphite and Kibana. The back end is Go and the front end TypeScript and React, shipped as a single binary with a plugin system for data sources, panels and apps; dashboards are JSON and can be version-controlled. Licensed under the AGPLv3 since 2021 (Apache 2.0 before), with Grafana Cloud and Grafana Enterprise as the commercial forms.

What it does and does not do. Grafana is a web application for analytics and visualisation. It does not store the metrics, logs or traces it shows: when a dashboard is rendered it queries the external data sources it has been pointed at and can combine results from several of them in a single panel. It maintains its own relational database, SQLite by default or MySQL or PostgreSQL, for dashboards, users, annotations and alert state only. That separation is the design decision that made it the front end to everyone else's telemetry, and the reason a Grafana dashboard can sit on top of Zabbix, Prometheus and a SQL warehouse at once.

Data sources and plugins. Core data sources shipped with Grafana include Prometheus, Graphite, InfluxDB and OpenTSDB for metrics; Loki and Elasticsearch for logs; Tempo, Jaeger and Zipkin for traces; Pyroscope and Parca for profiles; and MySQL, PostgreSQL and Microsoft SQL Server. Other back ends, OpenSearch and Splunk among them, arrive as separately installed plugins. Plugins fall into three categories, data source plugins for querying back ends, panel plugins for visualisation types and app plugins for bundled functionality. Dashboards are defined as JSON documents, can be provisioned from files, version-controlled and shared through Grafana's public dashboard library; alerting rules can be defined against any data source with notifications to e-mail, Slack, PagerDuty and other channels. The back end is written in Go and the front end in TypeScript with React, and the whole runs as a single binary.

Origins. Grafana Labs' own page says that in December 2013, looking for a better way to make data more accessible and interactive, Torkel Ödegaard created an open source dashboarding tool he called Grafana; the encyclopaedia dates the first release to January 2014, as an outgrowth of his work on Graphite at Orbitz, initially targeting Graphite and InfluxDB, with a user interface originally based on version 3 of Kibana. The name combines Graphite and Kibana. The company around it was founded in 2014 as Raintank and later took the product's name; Ödegaard, Raj Dutt and Anthony Woods are its co-founders.

The stack and the licence. Grafana Labs built or acquired the rest of what it calls the LGTM stack, Loki for logs, Grafana for dashboards, Tempo for traces and Mimir for metrics, and maintains k6, Pyroscope, Faro, Beyla and Alloy as well. Since 2021 Grafana has been licensed under the AGPLv3, having been Apache 2.0 before, the same move Zabbix made with 7.0 in 2024 and a cousin of the dispute recorded on the Elastic entry of the industry timeline. Grafana Cloud is the managed service, with Adaptive Telemetry and Grafana Assistant among its additions; Grafana Enterprise is the self-managed commercial edition with LDAP team synchronisation, data source permissions and reporting.

For the network engineer. Grafana is where the SNMP counters a Zabbix or Prometheus collector gathers end up on the wall of the operations centre, in the place where the MRTG page hung in 1998; the entries for MRTG, PRTG, Nagios and Zabbix tell the collectors' side, and the Grafana Labs record on the industry timeline tells the company's.

Also known as: grafana dashboards, grafana cloud, grafana enterprise, loki, tempo, mimir, lgtm stack

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