Forked to support multiple data sources beyond Elasticsearch. Now a $6B company.
Kibana 3 was a browser-based analytics and visualization platform designed specifically for Elasticsearch. Grafana forked it to create a data-source-agnostic time-series visualization platform. It now supports 150+ data sources including Prometheus, InfluxDB, PostgreSQL, CloudWatch, and many others.
During the Christmas holidays of 2013, a Swedish developer named Torkel Odegaard was tinkering with Kibana 3, Elasticsearch's open-source dashboard frontend. He loved how easy Kibana made it to build dashboards, but he was frustrated by a fundamental limitation: Kibana only talked to Elasticsearch. If your metrics were in Graphite (as many were at the time), you were out of luck. The Kibana team had explicitly decided that supporting other data sources wasn't their mission.
So Torkel forked Kibana 3's codebase and started building what he initially called 'Grafana' — a portmanteau whose exact etymology he's been coy about (Graf + ana? Graphite + Kibana?). The first commit hit GitHub on December 5, 2013, and the project was publicly released in January 2014. From day one, the key differentiator was multi-data-source support: Grafana could visualize time-series data from Graphite, InfluxDB, OpenTSDB, and eventually dozens of other backends.
What started as a holiday side project turned into one of the most consequential forks in software history. Grafana quickly became the de facto standard for infrastructure monitoring dashboards, beloved by DevOps teams worldwide. In 2015, Torkel met Raj Dutt and Anthony Woods in New York, and together they founded Raintank (later rebranded to Grafana Labs in 2017).
The company's growth trajectory has been remarkable. From a Series A of $24 million in 2019, Grafana Labs raised progressively larger rounds, reaching a $6 billion valuation in August 2024 after a $270 million Series D extension. The open-source project itself now has thousands of contributors and supports virtually every data source imaginable.
Grafana is proof that sometimes a fork doesn't need drama or conflict — just a developer who sees a gap the original project won't fill, and has the skill and tenacity to fill it.
First Grafana commit on GitHub — forked from Kibana 3
Grafana publicly released with Graphite and Elasticsearch support
Torkel meets Raj Dutt and Anthony Woods; they co-found Raintank
Raintank rebrands as Grafana Labs
Series A: $24 million raised
Series C: $220 million at $3 billion valuation
Series D extension: $270 million at $6 billion valuation
Grafana became the universal dashboard layer for infrastructure monitoring, effectively democratizing observability. Before Grafana, monitoring dashboards were tightly coupled to specific data stores; after Grafana, any backend could be visualized through a single, beautiful interface. It spawned an entire ecosystem — Grafana Loki for logs, Grafana Tempo for traces, Grafana Mimir for metrics — that competes with the full Elastic stack.
The fork also illustrates how a simple architectural decision (multi-source support vs. single-source loyalty) can be the foundation of a multi-billion-dollar company. Kibana remained tied to Elasticsearch and became a component of the Elastic stack; Grafana became a platform that transcends any single data source.