page_title: About Grafana
page_description: Introduction to Grafana.
page_keywords: grafana, introduction, documentation, about

# About Grafana

Grafana is a leading open source application for visualizing large-scale measurement data.

It provides a powerful and elegant way to create, share, and explore data and dashboards from your disparate metric databases, either with your team or the world.

Grafana is most commonly used for Internet infrastructure and application analytics, but many use it in other domains including industrial sensors, home automation, weather, and process control.

Grafana features pluggable panels and data sources allowing easy extensibility. There is currently rich support for [Graphite](http://graphite.readthedocs.org/en/latest/), [InfluxDB](http://influxdb.org) and [OpenTSDB](http://opentsdb.net). There is also experimental support for [KairosDB](https://github.com/kairosdb/kairosdb), and SQL is on the roadmap. Grafana has a variety of panels, including a fully featured graph panel with rich visualization options.

Version 2.0 was released in April 2015: Grafana now ships with its own backend server that brings [many changes and features](../guides/whats-new-in-v2/).    
Version 2.1 was released in July 2015 and added [even more features and enhancements](../guides/whats-new-in-v2-1/).

## Community Resources, Feedback, and Support

Thousands of organizations large and small rely on Grafana, and we have a vibrant and active community that constantly inspires us.

Please don't hesitate to [open a new issue on Github](https://github.com/grafana/grafana/issues) with your suggestions, ideas, and bug reports.

Most of the new features and improvements that go into Grafana come from our users. We greatly value your feedback and suggestions; we consider them paramount to making the product better!

If you have any trouble with Grafana, whether you can't get it set up or you just want clarification on a feature, there are a number of ways to get help:

- [Troubleshooting guide](/installation/troubleshooting/)
- \#grafana IRC channel on the freenode network (chat.freenode.net)
- Search closed and open [issues on GitHub](https://github.com/grafana/grafana/issues)
- [Mailing list](https://groups.io/org/groupsio/grafana)

## Commercial Support

[raintank](http://www.raintank.io), the company behind Grafana, will be launching a SaaS Grafana-based platform later this year that will also include commercial support for all your existing Grafana installations. Please sign up for [early access at raintank](http://www.raintank.io) for more information.

## License

By utilizing this software, you agree to the terms of the included license. Grafana is licensed under the Apache 2.0 agreement. See [LICENSE](https://github.com/grafana/grafana/blob/master/LICENSE.md) for the full license terms.
