'The Story of Grafana' documentary: The business of open source

Grafana Labs, initially known as Raintank and founded in 2014, aimed to create a sustainable business around the open-source Grafana project by using revenue from commercial offerings to reinvest in the technology. Despite early challenges in monetization and roadmap clarity, Grafana Labs experienced success through a community-driven approach and a big tent strategy, making Grafana compatible with over 100 data source plugins. This led to the development of commercial products like the Grafana Cloud platform and Grafana Enterprise offerings. With a focus on technology for practitioners rather than buyers, Grafana Labs now serves over 3,000 customers, including major companies like Bloomberg and Salesforce, and dedicates 80% of its engineering resources to open-source projects. The company's journey is captured in "The Story of Grafana," a documentary series reflecting on its origins and growth into a robust open-source community with over 20 million users.