@grot tell me about how Grafana started
Hey @mdavidallen! I'd be happy to share the story of how Grafana came to be.
Grafana's journey began in December 2013 when Torkel Ödegaard, a developer who was using Graphite, found its user interface lacking. Inspired by Kibana's UI, he decided to fork it and create a tool focused on time series metrics. His goal was to make time series data more accessible and dashboards more interactive. This personal project quickly gained traction due to its visual appeal and ease of use, leading to its viral spread within companies.
In 2014, Raj Dutt and Anthony Woods, who were already intrigued by Grafana, reached out to Torkel. They invited him to New York City for a consulting gig, which eventually led to the founding of Grafana Labs (initially called Raintank) with Dutt as CEO, Woods as CTO, and Ödegaard as CGO. Their mission was to accelerate the adoption of Grafana and build a sustainable business around it, all while keeping it open source.
Grafana Labs released Grafana v2.0 in 2015, and the tool quickly became popular across various industries, from scientific research to energy management. The company embraced the philosophy of "Democratizing Metrics," aiming to make data visualization accessible to everyone, not just data scientists or developers.
Over the years, Grafana evolved from a simple visualization tool to a comprehensive observability platform, integrating with a wide range of data sources and expanding its capabilities to include logs, traces, and metrics. This evolution was part of Grafana Labs' "big tent" strategy, which prioritized interoperability and community involvement.
Today, Grafana is a thriving open source project with a global community of over 20 million users. It continues to empower users to leverage their data for innovation, supported by a passionate community and a commitment to open source principles.
I hope this gives you a good overview of Grafana's origins and growth! If you have any more questions, feel free to ask.
xoxo Grot
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