Strong community contributions and efficient review processes power this popular open-source observability platform
Introduction
Grafana is a leading open-source platform for monitoring, visualization, and observability. Since its initial launch in 2014, Grafana has grown to become the standard for time series analytics, with over 68,000 GitHub stars and a thriving ecosystem of plugins and integrations. The platform allows users to query, visualize, alert on, and understand metrics no matter where they're stored, enabling the creation of beautiful dashboards to foster a data-driven culture.
We researched Grafana on collab.dev and uncovered some interesting collaboration patterns that highlight the project's commitment to code quality and community engagement.
Key Highlights
- Strong Community Engagement: 75% of PRs come from community contributors, demonstrating the project's success in fostering external participation.
- Near-Perfect Review Coverage: With 99% of PRs receiving reviews before merging, the Grafana team maintains exceptional quality standards.
- Minimal Bot Usage: Unlike many modern projects, Grafana maintains a human-centric development approach with only 4.9% of repository events coming from bots.
Comparison with Kibana
When comparing Grafana with Elastic's Kibana (another popular visualization platform), we see some interesting differences:
- Initial Reviews: Kibana shows remarkably fast initial reviews (13s median vs Grafana's 1h 47m) with 69.6% of reviews happening within the first hour (compared to Grafana's 45.6%).
Response Times: Grafana demonstrates significantly faster overall wait times (25m 7s vs Kibana's 10+ weeks), indicating a more responsive development process.
Community Involvement: While both projects have strong community participation, Kibana has a higher percentage of community PRs (84% vs Grafana's 75%).
Core Team Engagement: Grafana's core team is more active, contributing 25% of PRs compared to Kibana's 9%, suggesting different approaches to project stewardship.
Grafana's approach reflects a balanced development model where the core team maintains significant involvement while welcoming community contributions, all while ensuring consistently high code quality through thorough reviews.
Top comments (4)
That's impressive review coverage - having 99% of PRs reviewed before merging really stands out to me. Do you think this balance between core team and community might be why Grafana feels so reliable in practice?
I think so! The core team / maintainers probably value strong best practices among the PR processes and ensure reliability by being involved.
growth like this is always nice to see. kinda makes me wonder - what keeps stuff going long-term? like, beyond just the early hype?
I think seeing projects like this consistently working upon each other motivates more contributors to join the community. Contributors are less nervous to be involved, maintainers avoid burnout, and we constantly grow alongside each other!