I really hope to NOT frame this as a criticism - but as a discusson, as i LOVE grafana (And I’m very thankful that it’s open source and users are allowed to use it for non-commercial uses without cost). Its an amazing peice of software that allows us to do things not possible with other services/apps.
As of the past 1 year or so, I’m curious if others have any information on why the frequency of updates has reduced for Grafana.
(perhaps the another app/project that has taken 1st-priority at Grafana Org? i know they now put out several different apps / services ie: Loki / Tempo - VS back around Grafana v7 v8 v9 - Grafana-Server was the only project (for the most part). Did managment cut costs and reduce staff prehaps?
To be more clear it just seems to me that the frequency of bug fixes and new features in connection with the new versions of Grafana being released has gone down quite a bit.
Is it just me and my use-case or do others notice this or have some insiight to share on this?
(or maybe im just being greedy and am wrong about this?)
thank you.
Do you have any metric for that?
BTW: Grafana Lab has ~1k employees now, so I would say more people => more features/products.
If you have free (OSS) Grafana, then you may feel that your issues/features are not processed. Of course paid (enterprise) users have more priority - they can shape product, e.g. bug report/fixing, feature requests via support, features in private preview, meeting with devs, …
BTW: I hate any new features/updates (on the enterprise) level :-D. I prefer working stable product - I’m upgrading only when I have to usually (e.g. security releases). I already raised feature request to have LTS (long term support) version with minimal new features/updates.
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ok thanks, that actually makes alot of sense. perhaps grafana has become so popular (and used in so many paid / enterprise deployments) - that stability and performance (gains) are the priority now (ie what is demanded by the paying customers). Compared to several versions / years ago when it was more about faster / new features as the product was trying to grab mind-share (which it was successful at).
Grafana Lab has ~1k employees no
I didnt realize Grafana was that large! impressive.
Do you have any metric for that?
No i dont, im just going off my own experience of following grafana very closely (and using it extensively), for quite some time.
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healthy criticism is needed for a quality product. another thing that results in a quality product is working to improve the product. in this case, if you see something that can improve grafana, post it in their github and even better contribute code to fix/improve grafana. especially if one is using the free version.
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i tried to get some data on this (not because its important at this point, but more so just for fun, as my question has already been answered to my satisfaction).
One other point- I didn’t realize how many other major projects grafana labs has going on as of the past few years. (mirmir, loki, tempo, alloy, onCall ect…). so that also factors into my original question at the top.
here is some rough data (for number of releases per 1-month bucket, via chatGPT, which i feed data to , via just regex extracting the Version and Date from:
https://raw.githubusercontent.com/grafana/grafana/main/CHANGELOG.md
(so its not super accurate, as some of the release dates seemed to be repeated a bit).
this one below is more relevant, From Github insights, but unfortunately it only lets you go back about a year (as i would like to see this for a longer time frame).
(Also I’ll bet if you could get this same graph on # of commits over time for Grafana as a total company for ALL their projects it’s increasing at an incredible pace - which goes back to my original post/question)
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