Grafana Labs is releasing Grafana v10. It’s also looking back this week on the 10th anniversary of the open-source data visualization platform. At the internationally organized GrafanaCON today, creator Torkel Ödegaard will present a keynote.
In the press release, Grafana explains why it came into being in the first place: to be able to visualize application behavior and performance on an open-source basis. “What’s been remarkable about the success of Grafana is the evolution of the visualization capabilities that have really blossomed as the Grafana dashboard became ubiquitous,” says Ödegaard.
v10: easier and more powerful
Victory laps aside, Grafana v10 promises to be much more powerful and easier for end users. Onboarding has been improved, making it easier to quickly set up data sources to create a dashboard. This has only become more important with the ever-growing complexity of applications. Companies maintain many applications that do not always behave as they should. An accessible dashboard is quite useful, making many issues with performance insightful and solvable.
Efficiency and scalability are central to Grafana 10. A nifty addition is the ability to share dashboard data with external partners. That way, users may be able to get more apparent help from fellow developers if an application seems to be giving problems. In addition, there should be more simplicity in presenting disparate data sources.
“Observability data – in its early days, the domain of site reliability and platform engineering teams – has exploded in popularity with developers at large,” says Tom Wilkie, CTO at Grafana Labs. “Grafana 10 has elevated the developer UX for observability data so any developer can jump right in and get started connecting data sources, creating dashboards, and sharing and extending these resources to teammates.”
20 million users
To add to the festivities, Grafana reveals that one now has over 20 million users. There are now 150 data sources available as Grafana plugins. There are multiple ways to get started with Grafana, but one touts Grafana Cloud itself as the optimal solution. It has a “forever free” tier that allows three users, 10,000 metrics, 50GB of logs and 50GB of traces. Those who want more can expand at scale. The data visualization tool is also available for cloud services such as AWS, Azure and Google Cloud through the relevant Marketplaces.
Also read: Grafana Cloud delivers on-call management while making Loki easier to use