Grafana Labs
Grafana helps DevOps teams visualize and correlate observability data across any source.
Grafana Labs provides an open-source observability platform that unifies monitoring, visualization, and alerting across multiple data sources without requiring data ingestion to a vendor backend. Built with Go (backend) and TypeScript/React (frontend), it connects to Prometheus, Loki, Elasticsearch, InfluxDB, and 100+ other sources via a plugin architecture. Teams use Grafana to correlate metrics, logs, and traces in one place to accelerate incident root-cause analysis and reduce MTTR.
Problem solved
Engineering teams struggle to correlate metrics, logs, and traces across siloed monitoring systems, slowing incident response and root-cause analysis.
Target customer
DevOps, SRE, and platform engineering teams at mid-market and enterprise companies; developers building on-premise monitoring infrastructure
Founders
R
Raj Dutt
CEO & Co-Founder
Previously founded Voxel (infrastructure hosting) in 1999; watched open source commoditize infrastructure and saw opportunity in observability.
A
Anthony Woods
CTO & Co-Founder
Co-founded Voxel with Raj Dutt; worked on cloud infrastructure before identifying the need for unified observability tooling.
T
Torkel Ödegaard
Chief Grafana Officer
Created Grafana as a personal project starting December 2013; released it in January 2014 as an outgrowth of work on Graphite at Orbitz.
Funding history
Seed
$6M
2015
Led by Lightspeed Venture Partners
Series A
$24M
2017
Led by Lightspeed Venture Partners
Series B
$50M
2019
Led by Unknown
Series C
$220M
2020
Led by Sequoia Capital
Series D
$240M
April 2022
Led by GIC
· Lightspeed Venture Partners, Sequoia Capital, Coatue, Lead Edge Capital, J.P. Morgan, K5 Global
Series D Extension
$270M
August 2024
Led by Lightspeed Venture Partners
· GIC, Sequoia Capital, Coatue, Lead Edge Capital, J.P. Morgan, K5 Global, CapitalG
Series E
$250M
February 2026
Led by Unknown
Total raised:
$1.04B+
Industries
Pricing
Grafana Cloud: Free tier available; Pro tier at $8/user/month (or $55/user/month with Enterprise plugins); consumption-based charges for metrics, logs, traces scaled by volume and retention. Grafana Enterprise: Custom pricing starting at $25,000/year annual commitment. Grafana OSS: Free open-source version.
Integrations
Prometheus, Loki, Elasticsearch, InfluxDB, PostgreSQL, Graphite, CloudWatch, Azure Monitor, Google Cloud Monitoring, Datadog, New Relic, 100+ via plugin system
Tech stack
Alpine.js (JavaScript frameworks)
jQuery (JavaScript libraries)
Bootstrap (UI frameworks)
Hugo (Static site generator)
Zendesk (Documentation)
Prism (UI frameworks)
Twitter (Widgets)
Google Analytics (Analytics)
Google Font API (Font scripts)
Font Awesome (Font scripts)
Nginx (Reverse proxies)
Google Workspace (Email)
Google Cloud (IaaS)
Twitter Ads (Advertising)
Sectigo (SSL/TLS certificate authorities)
Sendgrid (Email)
Website
Competitors
Datadog
Proprietary, vendor-locked platform with built-in data collection; Grafana is open-source and vendor-agnostic, connecting to existing systems.
New Relic
All-in-one observability requiring data ingestion to their backend; Grafana unifies data in-place without vendor lock-in.
Elastic Stack
Primarily focused on logs and search; Grafana provides broader multi-signal correlation across metrics, logs, and traces.
Prometheus
Prometheus is a time-series database; Grafana is the visualization and alerting layer that works with Prometheus and 100+ other sources.
Why this matters: Grafana became a unicorn in 7 years by solving a critical pain point in observability: the fragmentation of monitoring tools. As infrastructure complexity exploded (multi-cloud, microservices, open-source everywhere), teams needed a vendor-agnostic layer. Grafana's open-source model, extensible plugin architecture, and focus on unifying existing data sources made it indispensable for DevOps and SRE teams, culminating in $1B+ in funding and a $6B+ valuation.
Best for: DevOps and SRE teams at enterprises needing to monitor complex, multi-source infrastructure without vendor lock-in or data silos.
Use cases
Multi-source incident investigation
When a service degrades, on-call engineers query metrics from Prometheus, logs from Elasticsearch, and traces from Jaeger in a single Grafana dashboard. They correlate suspicious patterns across signals and identify the root cause (e.g., a database query spike) in minutes instead of hours.
Cross-team observability standardization
Large enterprises with fragmented monitoring (some teams use CloudWatch, others Datadog, others Prometheus) use Grafana as a unified pane of glass. Each team keeps their backend; Grafana connects them all, enabling consistent alerting and dashboard standards across 50+ teams.
On-premise and air-gapped deployments
Regulated industries (finance, healthcare) deploy Grafana OSS on-premise to avoid sending telemetry to cloud vendors. They connect it to internal Prometheus clusters and maintain full data sovereignty while gaining enterprise-grade visualization and alerting.
Alternatives
Datadog
Proprietary all-in-one platform with agent-based collection; choose Datadog if you want simplified onboarding but accept vendor lock-in.
Elastic Stack
Stronger for logs and full-text search; choose Elastic if logs are your primary signal and you want deep search capabilities.
Prometheus + Alertmanager
Lightweight, metrics-only open-source; choose raw Prometheus if you only need time-series metrics and prefer minimal overhead.
FAQ
What does Grafana do? +
Grafana is an open-source observability platform that visualizes, alerts on, and correlates metrics, logs, and traces from any data source (Prometheus, Elasticsearch, Datadog, CloudWatch, etc.). It doesn't ingest data to a vendor backend; instead, it unifies data wherever it lives, helping teams root-cause incidents faster and understand system behavior.
How much does Grafana cost? +
Grafana Cloud: Free tier, Pro at $8/user/month, Enterprise with plugins at $55/user/month plus consumption-based charges for data volume. Grafana Enterprise (on-premise): Custom pricing starting at $25,000/year. Grafana OSS: Free and open-source.
What are alternatives to Grafana? +
Datadog (proprietary, all-in-one), New Relic (vendor-locked SaaS), Elastic Stack (log-focused), Prometheus (metrics-only backend), Splunk (enterprise logs), and Dynatrace (AI-driven APM).
Who uses Grafana? +
DevOps, SRE, and platform engineering teams at mid-market and enterprise companies. Target customers include tech companies with complex multi-cloud infrastructure, regulated industries needing on-premise deployment, and teams already investing in open-source monitoring stacks.
How does Grafana compare to Datadog? +
Grafana is open-source, vendor-agnostic, and connects to existing backends without data migration; Datadog is a proprietary platform that requires sending all telemetry to their infrastructure, offering simpler setup but vendor lock-in. Grafana excels for teams with multiple data sources; Datadog for teams wanting unified collection and fewer integrations.
Tags
observability
monitoring
visualization
metrics
logs
traces
open-source
DevOps
alerting
incident response