Why Grafana: Part II
Today, Grafana Labs announced a $50M Series B financing led by Lightspeed to help the company aggressively accelerate its product roadmap. It was only ten months ago that we wrote about our investment in the company’s Series A round, and the progress they’ve made since then has been nothing short of inspiring — and all the while remaining true to the company’s original goals and core values:
- Doubled the number of Grafanistas, while maintaining their amazing company culture
- Grew Grafana to over 550,000 active instances, cementing itself as the de facto UI for observability
- GA’d Loki 1.0 and grew it to over 12,000 active instances
- Continued to be major contributors to CNCF projects like Cortex and Prometheus
- Released Grafana 7.0 which had game-changing features like distributed tracing support, data transformations, and a brand new plug-in architecture
- Pulled off an amazing GrafanCon 2020 in a virtual way, at the eleventh hour with nearly 20K registrants
- Grew its paying Grafana Enterprise and Grafana Cloud customer base, allowing the company to re-invest back into open source
The observability market is rapidly changing, too. It seems every major software vendor and startup is now hawking a ‘complete’ solution for observability that combines metrics, logs, and tracing. Website messaging seems to all blur together. Most of these products are not bad, but they all began by being really good at one thing (eg logging) but have struggled to create equally good offerings in other areas (eg metrics/tracing). They claim that they will be your sole observability solution, but in real-life, most enterprises are using half a dozen products or more. Enterprise observability architecture continues to get more complex and one size does not fit all use cases. Customers feel like every vendor is trying to lock them into their expensive platform. And why, as a company, would you constrain your entire future of innovation to a single vendor?
Grafana offers a different vision. It says “Hey customer, you should own your own observability strategy! Don’t let a vendor force you into a platform that limits you in terms of features or cost.”
That’s why Grafana invests heavily in data source integrations with almost every other observability tool out there, so customers are in control of their destiny. They can use one product for metrics, another for logging, and a 3rd for tracing, and bring it all together with the Grafana UI. Best-of-breed and integrated at the same time, with the flexibility of open-source. At Lightspeed, we believe that this is truly the winning formula for the future of observability.
