Grafana Labs

Grafana Labs is an open source observability company originally founded in 2014 by Torkel Odegaard in Stockholm, Sweden, who created the Grafana dashboarding tool as a fork of Kibana to work with time-series databases. While the company is now incorporated in the US, it maintains strong European roots with significant operations in Sweden and across Europe. Grafana has become one of the most widely adopted open source monitoring and observability platforms in the world, with millions of active installations and a vibrant community of contributors.

The Grafana ecosystem encompasses a comprehensive observability stack: Grafana for visualization and dashboards, Prometheus and Mimir for metrics, Loki for log aggregation, Tempo for distributed tracing, and Grafana OnCall for incident management and alerting. The platform supports over 150 data source plugins, enabling teams to visualize and correlate data from virtually any system. Key features include powerful query editors, annotations, team-based organization, the Explore view for ad-hoc investigation, and a sophisticated alerting system. Grafana can be self-hosted for complete control or used as Grafana Cloud, a fully managed SaaS offering with EU-hosted options.

With its open source core available on GitHub under AGPL-3.0, Grafana provides full transparency and eliminates vendor lock-in -- organizations can always self-host and retain complete ownership of their data and configuration. Grafana Cloud offers EU data center hosting and holds SOC 2 certification, meeting the compliance requirements of European enterprises. For European engineering teams seeking an open, flexible alternative to proprietary observability platforms like Datadog or Splunk, Grafana offers the rare combination of community-driven innovation, enterprise-grade capabilities, and the freedom to deploy anywhere including fully within EU infrastructure.