
Grafana Labs announced the general availability of six AI capabilities, extending Grafana Assistant into an agentic operations layer that detects, investigates, and remediates production issues at the pace AI now creates them.
The releases include Grafana Assistant Investigations, Grafana Assistant Workspace, Grafana Assistant Automations, the Grafana Cloud MCP server, gcx, and Grafana Agent Observability.
"We used to treat observability as something you bolt on just before code reaches production," said Mat Ryer, Senior Director of AI, Grafana Labs. "That's changing. Now, Grafana Assistant can review your plans before you've written a line of code, add the instrumentation for you once you have, watch features as they land in production, and stay with you as you scale while dealing with the inevitable incidents that follow. It's the same assistant end-to-end, and it doesn’t just advise; it acts.”
Grafana Assistant Workspace, now generally available, gives that first conversation a home: chat history, live canvas, and investigation reports in one place instead of a sidebar. Bring in an architecture before a service exists, and Grafana Assistant flags where it won't scale — before anyone opens an editor. Paired with Grafana Assistant Investigations, a running investigation becomes a shareable report, no rewriting required.
Once a plan is in shape, Grafana Assistant helps engineers act on it without losing speed. Ask Grafana Assistant to instrument a new service, and it opens a pull request with the instrumentation in place, wires up the data source, configures Grafana, and watches until telemetry arrives, iterating with you if it doesn't. Two GA releases power this stage: gcx and the Grafana Cloud MCP server.
gcx, Grafana's agentic CLI for managing dashboards, alert rules, data sources, and other resources as code, brings self-managed Grafana and Grafana Cloud under one command line, with agent-friendly input and output for tools like Claude Code, GitHub Copilot, and Cursor, and full GitOps support for versioning dashboards and alerts in Git.
The Grafana Cloud MCP server gives any MCP-compatible client, including Claude Desktop, Cursor, and more, direct access to a Grafana instance's dashboards, alert rules, incidents, and data sources. No more pasting metrics into a chat window; the agent queries live telemetry from where the code is being written.
Engineers can ask Grafana Assistant questions about their telemetry in plain language, learn what a signal is actually telling them, and plan their next move by correlating technical data with business outcomes.
Grafana Assistant Investigations and Grafana Assistant Automations are both now generally available, helping engineers get answers out of production faster than they can type their questions. When an incident happens, Grafana Assistant Investigations forms hypotheses about what went wrong and swarms over the problem to chase down the leads in the data, proving or disproving each one. Engineers can stay in the driver's seat and steer the investigation themselves, or step back and wait the few minutes it takes for Grafana Assistant to finish and hand back a conclusion. Grafana Assistant Automations let a saved Grafana Assistant prompt run again automatically, on a schedule, or on demand, so recurring checks like a daily error rate summary are sent to your Slack channel without anyone re-typing the same question every morning.
Grafana Agent Observability, generally available today, extends Grafana Cloud's OpenTelemetry-native monitoring to the AI systems teams are now shipping. It was born out of necessity: Grafana Labs needed to observe Grafana Assistant itself once usage started spiking past expectations. Instrumented agents emit telemetry that captures the usual signals (usage, latency, and errors) alongside two that matter specifically for AI systems: token usage/cost and the conversation itself. Conversation data gives teams forensic-level debugging down to the individual exchange. Built-in evaluators go a step further, letting teams introspect conversations to test a sample of conversations for the agent behavior directly, catching hallucinations, drift, or policy violations before a customer does.
“AI should allow you to move at 10x velocity, not produce incidents at 10x the rate,” Ryer said. “That's why we're releasing all these AI capabilities in a single week. Engineers shouldn't have to wait for their tools to catch up to how quickly they're already moving.”
Assistant Investigations, Assistant Workspace, Assistant Automations, the Grafana Cloud MCP server, gcx, and Agent Observability are all generally available now.
The Latest
Production incidents rarely announce themselves as database problems. They appear as slow transactions, timeouts, rising response times, or an application struggling under a workload it previously handled. APM provides an essential starting point. It can identify a slow transaction path, highlight an affected service, and show that a database dependency is consuming more time than expected. But identifying the database as part of the problem is not the same as explaining what is happening inside it ...
Cloud teams are under constant pressure to reduce spend without slowing development or increasing operational risk. They are deploying autoscalers, rightsizing workloads, enforcing resource requests, reviewing utilization dashboards, and building FinOps processes around cloud-native environments. Yet the results often disappoint ...
Ask most IT leaders about their biggest concern with AI and you'll hear the same answer: hallucinations ... Today, however, the conversation has shifted ... As organizations move beyond chatbots and experiments, they are increasingly deploying AI agents that perform multi-step tasks. These systems retrieve documents, query databases, call APIs, generate reports, write code, and make recommendations. The issue is not whether the model can reason. The issue is whether the organization can see, verify, and govern the decisions being made along the way ...
While organizations want to take control of their telemetry, building telemetry pipelines from scratch can be a very daunting, complicated task, even when leveraging open-source standards like OpenTelemetry. It requires specialized knowledge across distributed systems, data engineering, and security. This fragmented approach across systems causes higher operational costs; it puts a strain on resources and reduces efficiency as teams have to work with different interfaces and processes ...
For decades, enterprise networks were designed around a simple assumption: work happened inside the office. Applications lived in centralized data centers, employees connected through internal infrastructure, and security focused on protecting the perimeter that surrounded everything ... But the way organizations operate today bears little resemblance to that environment. Cloud platforms host critical applications, employees connect from homes and airports as often as they do from offices, and partners collaborate through shared systems that exist far beyond corporate walls. In short, the corporate network no longer resembles the environment it was designed to protect ...
As an analyst who researches how IT organizations design, build, and operate their networks, I find that network data is a constant source of pain. Network teams struggle with data quality, fragmentation, authority, access, and trust. And these issues undermine everything they try to do. Here are the numbers: Only 45% of network teams are completely confident in the accuracy of their network source of truth, which documents the intent of their network ...
The 2026 Global Data Center Survey from Uptime Institute reveals an industry navigating workforce constraints, escalating outage expenses, even as rising costs remain the top concern for management teams ...
The next observability gap may not be in the code. It may be under the rack. That sounds strange until you think about how AI incidents actually feel in the middle of an investigation ... The application dashboard may be accurate. It may also be stopping at the wrong boundary. AI systems depend on software, but they also depend on a dense physical stack: racks, power paths, thermal margin, maintenance activity and, in many environments, liquid cooling. Those physical dependencies can change slowly before they look like a software incident ...
Certificate expiration is the rare outage you can see coming. Every TLS certificate carries the date it stops working, so the moment it will begin breaking connections is knowable in advance. That's what makes an expired certificate such a frustrating way to lose a service. What's changing now is how often that date comes around ...
Enterprises operate different combinations of workloads across cloud, hybrid and multicloud environments. For business-critical workloads, teams need to consider monitoring and observability early so they can detect health issues, investigate failures, and understand operational impact. Organizations place workloads on cloud platforms based on a combination of technical requirements, economics, existing dependencies, organizational standards, and business priorities. Their monitoring priorities therefore depend on what they operate and where those systems run. Those priorities will not look the same for every organization ...