Grafana Assistant

Grafana's AI copilot for queries, dashboards and incidents

Intermediate
Screenshot of Grafana Assistant, Grafana's AI copilot for queries, dashboards and incidents

What is Grafana Assistant?

Grafana Assistant is the AI chat layer in Grafana Cloud for writing queries, building dashboards and pages, running recurring analyses, and speeding up incident triage with Watchers and Investigations. Best suited to teams whose telemetry already lives in Grafana.

Grafana Assistant is the AI layer inside Grafana Cloud. It reads natural language requests and turns them into the artifacts observability work actually requires: queries, dashboards, and interactive Grafana Pages (the last in public preview). It sits alongside Agent Observability, Investigations and Adaptive Telemetry, so the same assistant that helps build a view can also explain what is going wrong in it. In day to day use the assistant is a chat surface over your telemetry. Operations teams use it to shorten onboarding, asking for a query or a starter dashboard instead of hand-writing everything from scratch. It can run recurring analyses, connect outward through MCP, Workspace and Automations, and provide step-by-step guidance that reads like assisted support. On the incident side, Assistant Watchers and Assistant Investigations (public preview) are pitched at moving a team from detection toward a proposed fix, with instant log and error explanations to speed triage. Grafana Managed Sandboxes are also listed as a public preview capability. The tool is aimed at SREs, platform engineers and observability teams already running Grafana Cloud. It is less a standalone product than a convenience layer: the value shows up when your metrics, logs, traces and profiles already live in the platform. A published customer quote from LexisNexis Risk Solutions frames the benefit as reduced cognitive load, letting engineers reach root cause without deep expertise in every part of a complex system. Compared with bolting a general chatbot onto monitoring data, Grafana Assistant has the advantage of native context: it can work with dashboard hygiene features such as AI-generated titles and descriptions, and with AI-assisted flame graph parsing in continuous profiling. The tradeoff is coupling. Adopting the assistant effectively means adopting Grafana Cloud, and several of the most interesting capabilities are still marked public preview rather than generally available.

How do you use Grafana Assistant?

  1. 1Create a Grafana Cloud account
    Sign up for the free tier to reach the Grafana Cloud interface. The free plan includes all services with usage limits and 14 days of retention.
  2. 2Open the Assistant chat
    Start a conversation in the Assistant panel and ask a plain language question about your data. The assistant responds with guidance or an artifact you can review.
  3. 3Generate a first dashboard
    Describe the service you want to monitor. The assistant writes queries and assembles a dashboard you can adjust, including AI-generated titles and descriptions.
  4. 4Connect your AI tooling
    Wire the assistant to external tools through MCP, Workspace and Automations so recurring analyses run without manual prompting.
  5. 5Investigate an incident
    Use Watchers and Investigations to trace an alert back through related signals and get an instant explanation of the relevant logs and errors.
  6. 6Set access controls
    Apply role-based permissions to investigations, rules and MCP server management before wider rollout across engineering teams.

Pros and cons

Pros

  • Natural language to queries and dashboards cuts the blank-page problem for new Grafana usersAI
  • Native context on your own telemetry, not a generic chatbot pasted onto monitoring dataAI
  • Extends into incident work through Watchers and Assistant InvestigationsAI
  • MCP, Workspace and Automations give a path to scripted operational workflowsAI
  • Access controls cover investigations, rules and MCP server managementAI

Cons

  • Value depends on already running Grafana Cloud; it is not a standalone assistantAI
  • Several headline capabilities (Grafana Pages, Watchers, Managed Sandboxes) are public previewAI
  • Pricing is usage based, so cost scales with telemetry volume rather than seatsAI
  • Little detail on model choice or data handling for teams with strict AI policiesAI
  • Feature surface overlaps with Agent Observability, which can confuse buyersAI

How much does Grafana Assistant cost?

Pricing

Grafana Cloud has three tiers. Free is $0 with usage limits and 14 days retention. Pro starts at $19 per month plus usage, with unlimited service access on pay as you go, 8X5 email support, 13 months metric retention and 30 days for logs, traces, profiles and k6. Enterprise starts at a $25,000 per year spend commit.

Learn more

Support

Free tier gets community support. Pro adds 8X5 email support. Enterprise adds premium support, custom retention and deployment options including Federal Cloud and Bring Your Own Cloud.

Integrations

Connects through MCP, Workspace and Automations, supports OpenTelemetry and open standards, and includes a prebuilt Anthropic integration with dashboards for tracking Claude usage and cost.

Features

Chat-driven onboarding, natural language query writing, dashboard and Grafana Pages building (public preview), recurring analyses through Automations, MCP and Workspace connections, Assistant Watchers, Assistant Investigations, Managed Sandboxes (public preview), AI-generated dashboard titles and descriptions, AI-assisted flame graph parsing, and role-based access controls.

Frequently asked questions about Grafana Assistant

  • How much does Grafana Assistant cost?
    Grafana Cloud has three tiers. Free is $0 with usage limits and 14 days retention. Pro starts at $19 per month plus usage, with unlimited service access on pay as you go, 8X5 email support, 13 months metric retention and 30 days for logs, traces, profiles and k6. Enterprise starts at a $25,000 per year spend commit.
  • How do you use Grafana Assistant?
    The walkthrough on this page covers 6 steps: 1. Create a Grafana Cloud account 2. Open the Assistant chat 3. Generate a first dashboard 4. Connect your AI tooling 5. Investigate an incident 6. Set access controls.
  • What platforms does Grafana Assistant support?
    Grafana Assistant is available on Web App.
  • What does Grafana Assistant integrate with?
    Connects through MCP, Workspace and Automations, supports OpenTelemetry and open standards, and includes a prebuilt Anthropic integration with dashboards for tracking Claude usage and cost.
  • What are the limitations of Grafana Assistant?
    Value depends on already running Grafana Cloud; it is not a standalone assistant. Several headline capabilities (Grafana Pages, Watchers, Managed Sandboxes) are public preview. Pricing is usage based, so cost scales with telemetry volume rather than seats.

Status

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Added10/21/2026

Platforms

Web App

Pricing

FreemiumSubscription