Grafana 2021: Year in review

In 2021, Grafana Labs experienced significant growth and success, marked by the release of Grafana 8.0, which introduced features such as unified alerting, new visualizations, and real-time streaming. The year saw over 7,000 pull requests for Grafana OSS and the publication of 22 new plugins, with 42 million plugin downloads. Grafana's commitment to its "big tent" philosophy was evident in its introduction of new data source plugins and integrations, enhancing its capability to monitor diverse metrics, logs, and traces. This included partnerships with major platforms like Amazon, Google, and Salesforce, and the introduction of plugins for services such as Redshift, CloudWatch, and Sentry. The Grafana community also embraced new tools for visualizing and analyzing data, as demonstrated in various webinars, community stories, and real-world applications, ranging from IoT projects to space station monitoring. These developments underscore Grafana's role in advancing observability and data visualization across industries.