As open source gains traction, successful projects will serve as springboards for fast-growing businesses. For proof, look no further than Grafana Labs, which today announced a $24 million Series A funding round.
Grafana Labs began as a way to monetize support for the open source analytics platform Grafana, which helps users monitor system security and performance by enhancing observability. Observability goes up when a system’s outputs give its controllers good information about how the system is performing. Those outputs include:
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Logs, which list events in a system. A failed login is one example of an event.
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Metrics, which measure things like memory and processing power use.
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Traces, which are lists of events that happens in response to a user request.
Since its start, Grafana Labs has spearheaded other open source projects, such as Prometheus, another monitoring platform, and Loki, a log aggregation system. Its stated goal is to synthesize these projects into an “open and composable observability platform with Grafana at its center,” according to a company statement.
The company offers two products. Grafana Enterprise provides more robust data, security and support for corporations, and Grafana Cloud is a SaaS version of the original platform that gives customers fully managed use of the tool for a monthly fee.
In conjunction with the new funding, the company announced three new executive appointments: Douglas Hanna as chief operating officer, Dave Kranowitz as vice president of global sales and Ryan McKinley as vice president of applications.
McKinley was the leading community contributor to the Grafana open source project. The company said it plans to use the new funding to continue investing in the open source community.
The round was led by Lightspeed Venture Partners. Lead Edge Capital also participated. Grafana Labs raised $4 million in its first five years, TechCrunch reported, which helped the company grow to 100 employees who work remotely from across the globe and 500 customers, including PayPal, eBay and Intel.
