Grafana was created by Torkel Odegaard in 2014 as a fork of Kibana, and Grafana Labs was founded in Stockholm, Sweden. The company has since grown to over 800 employees and raised more than $450 million in funding, with a valuation exceeding $6 billion as of 2024.
The platform connects to virtually any data source — Prometheus, InfluxDB, Elasticsearch, PostgreSQL, MySQL, CloudWatch, and many more. Teams build dashboards that pull data from multiple sources into a single view, making it easy to correlate metrics across different systems. There’s no need to move your data anywhere; Grafana queries it where it lives.
Grafana’s alerting system lets teams set up notifications through Slack, PagerDuty, email, and other channels. The dashboard-as-code approach means you can version control your dashboards alongside your application code. Grafana Cloud offers a fully managed SaaS experience with built-in support for Prometheus, Loki, and Tempo.
The broader Grafana stack includes Loki for log aggregation, Tempo for distributed tracing, Mimir for long-term metrics storage, and k6 for load testing. With over 60,000 GitHub stars and more than 1,000 community-built plugins, Grafana’s become the go-to visualization layer for DevOps and SRE teams worldwide. It’s used by companies like Bloomberg, JPMorgan, eBay, and PayPal.
