Explore the history of Grafana, a successful Kibana fork. Learn how two multi-billion dollar companies emerged from one project to compete in observability.

Quesma

Grafana started as a Christmas-break fork of Kibana by a Swedish developer at eBay, created because Elastic refused to support metrics visualization beyond Elasticsearch. While Kibana stayed tightly coupled to Elasticsearch, Grafana adopted a 'Big Tent' philosophy supporting all data sources and built a plugin ecosystem. Grafana evolved from a hobby project into a full observability platform, reaching $250M ARR and a $6B valuation in 2024. Meanwhile, Elastic IPO'd in 2018 and now holds an $8B valuation with $1.4B in annual revenue. The two companies now compete directly in the observability market, with Grafana growing faster despite Elastic generating more total revenue. The post also touches on Elasticsearch's architectural inefficiencies for log/security use cases and Grafana Loki's limitations for heavy log aggregation.

The most successful open-source fork, worth $6B

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