Grafana Labs, the company behind the open observability cloud, today announced a set of new AI-focused capabilities at GrafanaCON 2026: AI Observability in Grafana Cloud; a significant expansion of Grafana Assistant into more environments, as well as new agentic capabilities; the Grafana Cloud CLI (GCX), a new agentic interface for automated and agent-driven workflows; and o11y-bench, a new open source benchmark for evaluating AI agents running observability workflows. AI is transitioning from experimentation to production, while observability, control, and operational trust are still catching up.
Grafana Labs launches AI Observability in Grafana Cloud (Public Preview) to monitor and evaluate LLM-powered applications and agents in real time.
Grafana Assistant expands to on-premises Grafana Enterprise, Grafana OSS, and Microsoft Teams with new capabilities including Workspace, API, Automations, and Remote MCP server.
Grafana Cloud CLI (GCX) brings Grafana Cloud into AI-assisted development environments like Cursor, Claude Code, and GitHub Copilot.
o11y-bench is an open source benchmark for evaluating AI agents on observability workflows, built on Harbor.
Grafana Labs' 2026 Observability Survey found 15% of respondents skeptical about AI taking autonomous actions without stronger safeguards.
Mat Ryer appointed Senior Director of AI to lead AI observability, assistant experiences, and agent-driven workflows.
"AI systems are starting to look a lot like distributed systems did a decade ago: powerful, but difficult to reason about and even harder to operate," said Jen Villa, Senior Director of Product, Grafana Labs. "We're not approaching this as a separate category. The goal is to bring the same level of visibility and control to AI that teams already expect from the rest of their stack."
Launching in Public Preview, AI Observability in Grafana Cloud is a complete solution designed to help teams monitor and evaluate LLM-powered applications and agents in real time. As AI becomes embedded in customer-facing experiences, failures often don't look like classic telemetry: unexpected outputs, inconsistent behavior, and silent degradation that erodes trust before traditional dashboards light up. AI Observability in Grafana Cloud is built to close these visibility gaps by helping teams:
Observe AI agent behavior in real time, including inputs, outputs, and execution flows
Continuously evaluate outputs, with alerts for issues such as low-quality responses, policy violations, or anomalous behavior
Surface risk earlier, including potential data exposure or misuse (for example, leaked credentials or abnormal usage patterns)
Elevate agent sessions and conversations to first-class telemetry signals and correlate them in the same environment where applications are observed
Grafana Labs also announced a significant expansion of Grafana Assistant, its AI-powered agent for observability and operational workflows. Assistant is no longer limited to Grafana Cloud; it is extending to additional environments and surfaces, including on-premises deployments of Grafana Enterprise. Additional new capabilities coming to Grafana Assistant include:
Assistant Workspace: Bring Grafana Assistant into full-screen, chat, and browse visualizations at the same time
Assistant API: Call Grafana Assistant in workflows from anywhere
Automations: Schedule tasks and automation workflows without manual intervention
Remote MCP server: Connect any agent to Grafana's remote MCP server
Learn mode: Get personalized, hands-on lessons tailored to your role and infrastructure
Additional features: Grafana Assistant in Microsoft Teams, 50+ integrations, 15 native data source integrations, Python runtime, and EU-preferred inference for European customers
Grafana Labs also introduced the Grafana Cloud CLI (GCX), a new interface designed for a shift already underway in how software is built and operated: engineers are increasingly working through AI-assisted development environments like Cursor, Claude Code, and GitHub Copilot, where the agent becomes the primary interface. GCX is designed to bring Grafana Cloud into that workflow, so teams can:
Access the full Grafana Cloud surface area agentically, including provisioning, configuration, and telemetry querying
Invoke Grafana Assistant capabilities from the dev environment without context-switching
Close the agentic loop between code and production by using agents to query live observability insights, correlate alerts with recent repository changes, and propose fixes without leaving the development environment
Grafana Labs also announced it is open sourcing o11y-bench, a benchmark for evaluating AI agents on observability workflows. Built on Harbor and designed to run against a real Grafana stack, o11y-bench is intended to help teams measure how agents perform on the kinds of tasks that matter in practice: querying metrics, logs, and traces; investigating incidents; and making targeted dashboard changes.
"AI breaks in ways traditional observability wasn't designed for," said Mat Ryer, Senior Director of AI at Grafana Labs. "Latency and errors still matter, but they're not enough. You also need visibility into correctness, consistency, and shifting agentic behaviours over time. AI is quickly becoming a key part of the way teams investigate and operate systems. We want to make all of that observable in a way that's practical, reliable, and fits into how engineers already work today."
Together, these moves reflect a pattern: AI in production adds complexity that traditional tooling only partly covers. To coordinate work across AI observability, assistant experiences, and agent-driven workflows, Grafana Labs is forming a dedicated AI organization unifying these efforts under one team. Mat Ryer has been appointed Senior Director of AI and will lead this work across the company. Grafana Labs' 2026 Observability Survey found near-universal interest in AI's value, alongside real caution about autonomy: 15% of respondents expressed skepticism about AI taking autonomous actions without stronger safeguards.
About Grafana Labs
Grafana Labs, the company behind the open observability cloud, is founded on the principles of open source, open standards, open ecosystems, and open culture. Grafana Cloud, our fully managed observability platform, is flexible and built for scale. With Grafana Cloud's actually useful AI, organizations can see, understand, and act on all their disparate data to move at the speed of their ambitions. Today, more than 35 million users and 7,000+ customers – including Anthropic, Bloomberg, NVIDIA, Microsoft, and Salesforce – trust Grafana Labs to ensure reliability of their applications and systems, resolve incidents quickly, and optimize their telemetry to reduce noise and cost.
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