The emergence of a new breed of commercial open source company, challenging the dominance of public cloud, has set off a licensing war that calls into question the very meaning of open source. We debated this topic at last month’s GrafanaCon Los Angeles, where I participated in a spirited panel. Since then, the battle lines have been redrawn. Last week, Amazon announced its Open Distribution for Elasticsearch. And MongoDB Inc. abandoned OSI approval of its new SSPL license.

The rest of the city may still have been in a post-Oscars haze, but over 350 monitoring mavens gathered in downtown L.A. bright and early on Feb. 25 to kick off GrafanaCon 2019. The next two days were filled with 40+ talks, including Grafana end user stories from companies like Bloomberg and Tinder.

TimeShift is back after a few weeks away with a lot of updates to share. Nearly all of the Videos and presentations from GrafanaCon LA are available, so please check them out and let us know what you think. Also, if you hadn’t heard, Grafana v6.0 stable was recently released which has lots of new features and enhancements. Download the latest version v6.0.1 and read about the highlights below.

Grafana isn’t just being used for monitoring applications. Andrew Rodgers, Senior Systems Architect at New City Energy, spoke in Amsterdam at GrafanaCon EU 2018 about how his organization is using Grafana to measure energy usage in municipal buildings in Washington D.C. for the Department of General Services (DGS).