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Observability platforms are an unsung hero for Software as a Service (SaaS) infrastructure — helping monitor, troubleshoot, and optimize IT systems. They provide comprehensive, system-level intel that companies can use to maintain and optimize their tech stacks.
Given the vital role these platforms play, it’s no surprise that the market for observability tools is projected to reach an estimated $4.1 billion by 2028. Tech giants like IBM, Google, and Microsoft have solutions, as well as popular brands like Datadog.
But there’s another company gaining traction in this space — open-source developer Grafana Labs. The company was founded in 2014, has raised over $500 million in VC funding, and now has over 20 million global users across 1 million instances, including high-profile customers like Salesforce and PayPal.
Today, we’ll look at how Grafana is making significant inroads into the market by empowering their developer end-users with one of the most important assets for any technical brand — documentation.
It’s an approach that enhances user engagement and builds a community of developers who contribute to the platform’s evolution, enhancing its appeal and functionality.
Understanding the Open Source Grafana Stack
To understand why documentation is so crucial to Grafana’s success, you need to know how open-source companies succeed. Cofounder and CEO Raj Dutt highlighted this in an interview a few years ago, stating:
So mission number one for us is actually growing the community, increasing adoption, and then monetization is number two…
Open source has never been about value capture. Open source has been about value creation. So the model is we will do a tremendous amount of value creation, and a very small amount of value capture.
Looking at the Grafana Labs product suite, it’s clear they create a lot of value.
The core of this suite is the eponymous Grafana, their flagship application, which allows users to build dashboards to visualize data from various databases like InfluxDB, Elasticsearch, and Prometheus.
Grafana Labs complements this powerful tool with several other open-source projects, including:
- Loki — log aggregation system
- Tempo — distributed tracing system
- Mimir — long-term metrics storage
These tools form Grafana’s core value add — their logs, tracing, and metrics or LGTM stack. As for revenue capture, they also offer both managed cloud and enterprise-level plans.
This comprehensive product portfolio is similar to other open-source multi-product companies like HashiCorp, which heavily invests in user support content to foster a strong user community and drive expansion into other products and service offerings.
According to HashiCorp’s recent earnings call, the growth flywheel for them (and companies like Grafana) looks like this:
- Win the end user: Create products that appeal to individual developers, engineers, and other IT pros who actually use them.
- Standardize the ecosystem: Ensure the product fits with existing tools and workflows to provide a reliable experience.
- Empower the customer: Provide tools, support, and resources that will help your customers succeed with the products.
Good documentation is crucial for tech companies, especially when driving the second and third parts of this flywheel. These assets help newly converted users troubleshoot common issues and quickly unlock product value.
The faster your users unlock value, the faster they can demonstrate it to their organization — that means conversions, extensions, and expansions.
Grafana’s extensive documentation network is just another example of how these user support assets are key to success.
Let’s take a look.
Driving Expansion With Top-Tier Documentation
Regarding marketing channel distribution, Grafana Labs relies heavily on organic search — it drives 57% of their web traffic — that’s around 250,000 organic visits per month.
A significant portion of this traffic runs through Grafana’s documentation subfolder, indicating that users actively seek support and guidance for using Grafana’s open-source products.
The documentation subfolder contains over 2,500 pages, showcasing Grafana’s extensive investment in supportive, UX-friendly content for their users. And their top-performing documentation pages drive substantial traffic and provide significant value.
Overall, the top seven pages alone bring in more than $12.2k worth of traffic every month.
Grafana’s technical writing team excels in creating user-friendly documentation that includes detailed guides on installation, configuration, and usage across various operating systems and cloud platforms.
Grafana Documentation
The leading documentation page for the main Grafana product is a prime example of effective technical content. At the time of writing, this page brings in 2,475 monthly visits, valued at $1.4k.
Keeping users informed about new features and updates is critical in ensuring they continue to get value from the platform and are motivated to upgrade to higher tiers.
The standout features of Grafana’s documentation include:
1. Well-designed site structure
These documentation pages are mini landing pages that direct users to all the relevant content about the Grafana product.
If you look at the main Grafana documentation page as a distinct subfolder, it’s responsible for 29,000 visits — not to mention the 60,000 backlinks and 39,000 keywords.
Why should you look at it this way? Because that’s how the Grafana team designed it.
Check out the navigation bar on the left side of the screen. Under the main Grafana documentation header, you’ll see several drop-down tabs, including “What’s new,” “Set up,” and “Dashboards.”
Each of these leads to another layer of Grafana’s documentation network. All in all, there are over 530 distinct documentation pages under the /docs/grafana/latest subfolder.
Naturally, with all these related pages, there’s also a huge amount of interlinking — this Grafana documentation hub has 3,200 incoming and over 2,400 outgoing internal link groups.
It’s documentation all the way down, folks.
2. User-friendly formatting
The main Grafana documentation page is a collection of links to the most important documentation pages. It includes links to guides for installing the product, configuring and provisioning it, and connecting it to the most popular databases.
Once you click on one of these guides, you move to pages that more adequately fit the description of technical documentation: Clear, concise text and modules that let readers easily read and copy code.
For example, here’s a look at the “Configure Grafana” guide:
Pairing these types of code modules with straightforward technical copy is standard practice for companies that target developers, such as Grafana, MongoDB, and Confluent.
Again, it’s about making your products as easy as possible for your users — whether it’s open-source software or documentation.
And if you’re selling to this audience and still questioning the importance of documentation, check out some of these Reddit threads (they’re good for perspective and a laugh):
- ThE cOdE iS iTs OwN dOcUmEnTaTiOn
- People who don’t document, why are you the way that you are?
- The code is not enough documentation. Why do you hate writing docs?
3. User and community engagement
Grafana also does a great job of turning their documentation pages into a gateway to engagement — whether it’s diving deeper into the product stack or connecting with the broader community.
For example, at the bottom of every documentation page, there’s a section that prompts users to do the following:
- Provide user feedback like upvotes (and downvotes), suggested edits, doc contributions, and issue reporting
- Visit links to relevant documentation pages, the Grafana community subdomain, and the support page
Getting users engaged in product-related activities — whether those are doc reviews, contributions, or community posts — turns documentation into more than a customer support asset.
Open-source software developers are very much community-driven, so any opportunity to get users more involved is a win. It’s a win for your product team, your marketers, and your bottom line.
4. Multiple CTAs for creating a free account
From a revenue standpoint, Grafana’s goal is to expand as many individual product users into the next tier of their offering: Grafana Cloud.
The documentation pages prominently feature CTAs directing users to sign up for a free trial to check out the Grafana Cloud.
The copy for these CTAs is very to-the-point, focusing on the technical specs of the offering that will be more impactful than taglines or flashy branding.
Empower Your Users With Next-Level Support Content
Grafana Labs is a perfect example of how important documentation is to the success of open-source software.
Grafana uses their massive suite of free tools — Loki, Tempo, Mimir, and more — to capture new users. Whether it’s for setup or troubleshooting, the documentation pages help improve user experiences with products and drive expansion into paid and enterprise tiers. Their documentation educates and empowers users to maximize platform value, driving significant traffic and user engagement.
For more insights into how companies with technical B2B products drive growth, check out the following breakdowns:
