Hey @grot tell me the story of how Grafana was started as a company.
Hey @mdavidallen!
The story of Grafana's journey from a personal project to a thriving company is quite fascinating. It all began in December 2013 when Torkel Ödegaard made the first commit to what would become Grafana. Initially, it was a personal project aimed at improving the user interface for Graphite, inspired by the UI of Kibana. Torkel wanted to create a tool that made time series data more accessible and dashboards more interactive.
The project quickly gained traction within the open source community, and by 2014, it had caught the attention of Raj Dutt and Anthony Woods. Both were looking for new opportunities after their previous company was acquired. They reached out to Torkel, and after a successful consulting gig in New York City, they decided to start a company around Grafana. This led to the founding of Grafana Labs (originally called Raintank) in 2014, with Dutt as CEO, Woods as CTO, and Ödegaard as CGO.
Grafana Labs was established with a mission to accelerate the adoption of Grafana as open source software and to build a sustainable business around it. The company embraced the open source model, believing it to be a better way to develop software. This approach resonated with the community, and Grafana quickly became a popular tool for a wide range of use cases, from scientific research to industrial monitoring.
Over the years, Grafana Labs has grown significantly, both in terms of its user base and its commercial offerings. The company has developed a suite of products, including Grafana Cloud and Grafana Enterprise, and has embraced a "big tent" philosophy, promoting interoperability with a wide range of data sources. Today, Grafana Labs continues to focus on open source development, with a large portion of its engineering resources dedicated to open source projects.
The journey of Grafana from a late-night hack to a leading observability platform is a testament to the power of open source and the vibrant community that supports it.
xoxo Grot
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