AI/ML
Grafana is offering its AI assistant for free to open source and on-prem users — though on stage at its Barcelona user conference this week, CEO Raj Dutt joked they shouldn't use it too much.The observability vendor also took the wraps off Grafana 13 and a re-architected version of its Loki log aggregator, while dropping strong hints about expansion into broader business analytics and workflow beyond its observability tools.
Grafana 13 includes curated prebuilt dashboards tailored to specific data sources, templates around methodologies like DORA, and a generally available dynamic dashboards feature. Other additions include a redesigned query editor, a refreshed saved queries interface, and giving users the ability to create panels directly from saved queries. Git Sync, now generally available, lets ops teams manage "observability as code" within GitOps workflows.But you can't have a keynote these days without mentioning agents: Dutt announced the Grafana Assistant - previously cloud-only - is coming to on-prem and open source users. They'll need to connect to a Grafana Cloud account to handle the LLM connection, though observability data stays on-prem. The assistant can power automations in Slack or Teams, or it can be accessed via API or CLI.Grafana Cloud also gains AI Observability, promising real-time visibility into AI agent behavior. Principal engineer Mat Ryer described it as a "10,000-foot view" of where time, tokens and "therefore dollars" are going, with the ability to drill down into agent activity — including spotting policy violations or data exposure.
