Grafana Labs delivers rapid ERP migration and customer 360 to unlock growth

Grafana Labs is a leader in observability, helping organizations monitor and understand their systems through powerful open-source and commercial solutions. With a rapidly growing global footprint, Grafana relies on a central data and analytics team to empower business units — from finance to sales to marketing — with actionable insights.

As the company scaled, business demands on the data team multiplied:

• Finance required timely, reliable ERP data to support a migration from a custom system to NetSuite.
• Sales needed a unified view of customer activity to align revenue with adoption.
• Marketing needed accurate, self-service reporting across multiple digital platforms to optimize campaigns in real time.
• Product needed usage and adoption insights to fuel growth and retention strategies.

During that time, Fivetran enabled its marketing team to deliver analytics and modeling without having to build or maintain pipelines. Only later, as the company tackled larger-scale projects — including the ERP migration to NetSuite — did they hire dedicated engineering resources.

Faster ERP migration under tight deadlines

Once Grafana built out a dedicated data engineering team, one of its first major projects was migrating from a custom ERP to NetSuite. The transition was business-critical: finance and sales needed accurate data to support global operations, and leadership imposed an aggressive timeline.

ERP migrations are notoriously complex — NetSuite’s APIs are SOAP-based, XML-heavy, and constantly changing. Keeping custom-built pipelines stable would have consumed months of engineering time. Instead, with Fivetran handling ingestion and schema evolution, Grafana ingested validated NetSuite data in just 3-4 weeks, saving up to 8 weeks of development time.

A 360° view of the customer in just 2 weeks

To help sales and customer success teams spot opportunities and strengthen account health, Grafana also built a customer 360 dashboard that unified Salesforce, ERP, and billing data in BigQuery.

The first iteration was delivered in just 2 weeks — made possible because Fivetran had already centralized core systems in the warehouse. For leadership, the dashboard felt like “magic” — it was the first time the company had a full account view, unlocking upsell plays and proving the value of the data team.

“Delivering a full customer view in weeks proved the strategic value of our data team. It gave leadership confidence that data could directly influence growth and reshape our go-to-market strategy.”
— Chris Shih, Director of Data & Analytics at Grafana Labs

Marketing gains speed and autonomy

Grafana’s Demand Generation team was the earliest adopter of Fivetran and became largely self-sufficient with it. By connecting Google Analytics, Google Ads, LinkedIn Ads, Facebook Ads, and Marketo, the marketing team gained direct access to campaign performance data.

With pipelines managed centrally but dashboards built independently, marketing could monitor results and optimize spend without waiting on analytics or engineering resources.

Automation powers scale and efficiency 

Fivetran has reshaped how Grafana manages data and delivers insights:

• Fivetran’s automated schema evolution detects new fields and objects in Salesforce and NetSuite and syncs them into BigQuery automatically, ensuring data stays complete and up to date without manual work. 
• Fivetran’s prebuilt dbt packages (like Salesforce calculated fields) cut repetitive engineering work, saving the equivalent of 2 full-time hires.
• For 2 years before hiring data engineers, Grafana scaled reporting entirely through Fivetran.
• Today, BigQuery is the single source of truth across the business, replacing spreadsheets and ad hoc reports with reliable, scalable analytics. 

“My favorite thing about Fivetran is I don’t need to think about it. The data is always there — up to date and ready for our analysts.”
— Bob Samuels, Senior Manager, Data & Analytics Engineering at Grafana Labs

Looking ahead

Grafana is now building predictive models to forecast consumption and anticipate customer needs, leveraging Salesforce and NetSuite data already flowing through Fivetran. The company is also applying machine learning to strengthen revenue operations and enhance account-level insights. As Grafana’s global footprint expands, Fivetran’s automation ensures data pipelines remain reliable, freeing engineering resources to focus on innovation.

“We’re applying the same mindset of scale and reliability to our data that we bring to observability. With Fivetran, we know our foundation is strong, so we can focus on what’s next.”
— Chris Shih, Director of Data & Analytics at Grafana Labs

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