The dashboard that doesn't actually store your data

Technology · Published 20 October 2026 Swipe more like this →

In short: Grafana is the industry standard for visualizing complex telemetry, but it operates on a unique principle: it doesn't own the data it displays. By acting as a sophisticated lens rather than a warehouse, it can unify disparate sources into a single, coherent view of digital health.

Released in January 2014 by Torkel Ödegaard, Grafana was born as an outgrowth of work on Graphite at Orbitz. While it is now a powerhouse for observability, its core architecture remains decoupled from storage. Rather than keeping the visualized logs, traces, or metrics, this tool fetches data from outside sources instantly during dashboard generation. This allows it to combine results from multiple backends—such as Prometheus for metrics, Loki for logs, and Tempo for traces—into a single panel.

To manage the 'state' of the application itself, Grafana maintains its own internal relational database (defaulting to SQLite, but supporting MySQL or PostgreSQL). This internal database handles metadata like dashboard configurations, user permissions, annotations, and alert states, while the heavy lifting of data retrieval is offloaded to specialized plugins. The backend is built in Go, while the frontend utilizes TypeScript and React, allowing it to run as a single binary that connects to a vast ecosystem of external providers including AWS CloudWatch, Elasticsearch, and various SQL databases.

The platform's influence is reflected in its rapid commercial growth and technical expansion. Originally named Raintank, the company rebranded to Grafana Labs and reached a $6 billion valuation in 2024. Beyond the visualization tool, the company has built the 'LGTM Stack'—a suite of open-source backends including Loki, Grafana, Tempo, and Mimir. This ecosystem enables high-scale observability, used by organizations ranging from NASA and Wikimedia to Nvidia and Anthropic.

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