Grafana Assistant everywhere: Customize and connect to the AI agent to fit your specific needs
Source: Grafana Blog
Grafana Assistant – New Capabilities & How to Use Them
The ways you and your teams build and observe your systems are changing. It’s no longer just engineers looking at dashboards, writing queries, or editing config files. More often, an agent interacts with the data—helping write code, run applications, investigate incidents, right‑size deployments, and more.
At the same time, AI has accelerated software‑development cycles, making it essential to have the right information and workflows exactly when you need them, without context‑switching or hopping between tools.
Moving Assistant from Cloud Agent to “Anywhere” Agent
As part of the GrafanaCON 2026 keynote, we announced that access to Assistant now extends to Grafana Enterprise and Grafana OSS users. This makes Assistant available in your self‑managed environment to help you:
- Analyze telemetry data and code in real time
- Build dashboards and ask questions
- Resolve incidents and more
Self‑managed Grafana users can:
- Create a Grafana Cloud account
- Connect it to their Grafana installation via a one‑click setup
The Assistant is included in the Grafana Cloud “forever free” plan with generous limits, so you can get started right away.
Watch the video below to see how easy it is to get started.
Grafana Cloud customers have already saved lots of time and effort using Assistant. Working alongside the agent with natural‑language prompts, they’ve:
- Explained concepts
- Queried data
- Built dashboards
- Resolved incidents
- Expanded adoption
“There are so many signals and metrics to correlate that it’s a job a computer can do better than humans. With Grafana Assistant, we see fewer incidents, and when they happen the resolution is faster, so the team can stay focused on deploying new features.”
— Alessio Paccoia, Head of Technology, Cubbio.io
We still believe Grafana Cloud is the best place to get the full benefits of AI‑powered observability, but we also believe in choice. If you’re not ready to go all‑in on the cloud, this is a great way to try it out and see if it fits your needs.
How It Works
- Custom plugin runs in your browser.
- Your raw observability data stays in your Grafana instance.
- Only processed summaries and results are transmitted via our custom tooling architecture.
- Assistant “shows its work” by displaying the full conversation history.
- Errors or warnings from tool usage are fed back into the conversation, allowing Assistant to iterate and correct mistakes.
For more information, see the [Assistant documentation] and the [pricing page] (including details on the generous free tier).
Customize Assistant for Your Unique Needs
Every organization’s observability strategy and workflows differ, so Assistant can be tailored to your needs. We’re excited to make Assistant Skills generally available.
- Skills are documents you create to guide Assistant agents with instructions, context, and specialized knowledge.
- They let you encode how your team:
- Troubleshoots services
- Handles specific alerts
- Manages shared infrastructure
New Features
- Auto‑approve – Write runbooks, connect to other tools (GitHub, Cloudflare, other observability platforms, etc.), and auto‑approve selected tool calls.
- Assistant Investigations – Multi‑step investigations that can be combined with auto‑approve to build an auto‑remediation pipeline triggered from an alert.
Result: Anything from raising a PR in GitHub/GitLab, sending a Slack message, to assigning a task in Notion.
Stay on Top of Everything with Automations
Observability teams have a lot to keep track of, and agents are becoming central to software development. To help you stay on top of everything, we’re introducing Assistant Automations.
- Pair automations with skills to trigger Assistant anytime, with or without your direct involvement.
- Example use‑cases:
- Daily report of all alerts that fired yesterday
- Weekly rundown of incidents resolved last week
- Error‑rate summary for a product catalog
- Check if the latest deployments changed the P99 latency
Simply connect to an available integration or any API, write a skill, and you’ll receive full analyses about any question you have regarding your stack and its performance.
Say “Hello” to Assistant Outside of Grafana Cloud
You likely interact with your systems and teammates through tools other than Grafana Cloud. We want to meet you where you are, so we’re expanding the ways you can access Assistant:
- Slack – Chat with colleagues and Assistant.
- Microsoft Teams – Same seamless experience.
- API – Programmatic access.
- CLI – Use the new Assistant CLI (gcx) for automation, scripting, or remote‑machine requests.
You can even combine the CLI with Claude Code or Codex to collaborate with the Assistant. This flexibility lets you integrate Assistant into your existing workflows instead of forcing you into a single UI, reducing context‑switching overhead.
Bring Your Own Agent: Remote‑Hosted MCP Server & the New gcx CLI Tool
Content forthcoming…
For any questions or feedback, please reach out on our community forums or open an issue in the Grafana Assistant repository.
Bringing Assistant to You
You can now do more with Assistant. With our new remote‑hosted MCP server and the gcx CLI tool, your agents can talk to:
- Assistant
- Grafana Cloud
- Both simultaneously
Remote‑Hosted MCP Server
Use the MCP server to connect any agent to the same sophisticated tools that Assistant uses in Grafana Cloud.
- No dependencies required – just point your agent at
https://mcp.grafana.com/mcp. - Gain access to:
- Metrics, logs, traces
- Dashboards, alerts, incidents
- And much more
This also lets you connect other cloud agents to Grafana Cloud if you want to build your own assistant.
gcx – The Local‑First CLI
gcx unifies grafanactl and the Assistant CLI with new, agent‑first command‑line tools for your development environment.
- Connects your editor to your entire production stack.
- Enables agents to write observability‑aware code from the start.
Typical workflows:
- Instrument a new service.
- Investigate a firing alert.
- Draft a fix informed by real production data – all without leaving your editor.
Connect Any API with Assistant
Assistant can use the Infinity data source to send GET or POST requests to any publicly or privately available API endpoint.
- Makes Assistant the hub of your DevOps lifecycle.
- Lets you:
- Correlate data from any tool.
- Remediate faster than ever.
- (Or just check if you’ve caught all Pokémon yet!)
More Ways to Level Up Your Assistant Experience
We’re excited for you to try these new features, but they’re only part of what’s coming. Here are some of the recent updates we’ve released:
- New Workspace View – full‑page mode to browse chats and supporting data in one place.
- Learn Mode – tutorials and example tasks personalized to your stack.
- Reworked Context Management & Infrastructure Memories – Assistant knows where to look from the start.
- EU Inference – dedicated inference for European customers.
- Python Runtime – process large amounts of data directly in Assistant.
- Integrations – 15 additional Grafana Cloud services/features and 50+ third‑party data sources.
Want More Details?
- GrafanaCON 2026 announcement blog – all the news about these updates.
- Grafana Cloud AI page – FAQs about Assistant and our other AI capabilities.
Explore, automate, and observe—everything you need, right inside Assistant.