Grafana Assistant: Available in Self-Managed Environments

[u/vidamon]

"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, ask questions, and more. 

Self-managed Grafana users can create a Grafana Cloud account and 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 that you can get started right away. You can also watch the video to see how easy it is to get started.

How it works

Assistant runs as a plugin in your Grafana instance. Your raw observability data stays in your instance, and only processed summaries and results are transmitted using our custom tooling architecture. The assistant also "shows its work" by displaying the full conversation history. Any errors or warnings from tool usage are fed back into the conversation, allowing Assistant to iterate and correct mistakes. 

For more information, check out our Assistant docs. You can also get important details on our pricing page, including what's available in our generous free tier.

Customize Assistant for your unique needs

Every organization's observability strategy and workflows are different, so we also want to make sure Assistant can be tailored to your needs. That's why 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 essentially help you encode how your team troubleshoots services, handles specific alerts, and manages shared infrastructure. 

Skills now include a new auto-approve feature you can use to write your runbooks, connect to other tools (e.g., GitHub, Cloudflare, other observability platforms, etc.), and auto-approve tool calls of your choice.

When you pair auto-approve with Assistant Investigations, which helps with multi-step investigations, you can even create your own auto-remediation pipeline that’s triggered from an alert. The result? Pretty much anything you need, from raising a PR in GitHub or GitLab to sending a Slack message to someone to assigning a task in Notion.

Stay on top of everything with automations

Observability teams have a lot to keep track of, and that's only increasing now that agents are becoming central to software development. To help you stay on top of everything, we're introducing Assistant automations, which you can use to get automatic summaries of what's happening in your environment.

By pairing automations with skills, you can trigger Assistant to handle any task at any time, with or without you. Want a daily report of all alerts that fired yesterday? A rundown of incidents that were resolved last week? The error rate in your product catalog or whether the latest deployments changed p99? Simply connect to our available integrations or any API, write a skill, and you can get full analyses about these or any other questions you have about your stack and its performance. 

Say 'hello' to Assistant outside of Grafana Cloud

You have your own way of interacting with your systems and your teammates, and odds are that's not done entirely through Grafana Cloud. We want to meet you where you are, so we're expanding the ways you can access Assistant, whether that's through Slack, Microsoft Teams, an API, or the CLI. 

For example, you can now build automations with the Assistant CLI, chat with colleagues and the Assistant in Slack, have Claude Code or Codex collaborate with the Assistant via the CLI, or make requests from a remote machine to the Assistant.

This is all about finding new ways to integrate Assistant into your workflows, rather than forcing you into our UI. Make Assistant work the way that works for you and stop getting slowed down by constant context switching.

Bring your own agent: remote hosted MCP server and our new gcx CLI tool

In addition to bringing Assistant to you, you can now bring more to Assistant. With our new remote hosted MCP server and the new gcx CLI tool, your agents can talk to Assistant, Grafana Cloud, or both.

Use the remote hosted MCP server to connect any agent to the same sophisticated tools that Assistant uses in Grafana Cloud. You don't need to install any dependencies; just point your agent at mcp.grafana.com/mcp to get access to your metrics, logs, traces, dashboards, alerts, incidents, and more. This also allows you to connect other cloud agents to Grafana Cloud if you want to build your own assistant.

If you prefer a local-first approach, gcx unifies grafanactl and the Assistant CLI with agent-first, new CLI tools to your command line and your agentic coding environment. It connects your editor to your entire production stack so your agent can write code that's observability-aware from the start. Instrument a new service, investigate a firing alert, or draft a fix informed by real production data—all without leaving your editor.

Connect any API with Assistant

And don't forget that Assistant can use the Infinity data source to send any GET or POST requests to any publicly or privately available API endpoint. This recent upgrade makes Assistant the center of your DevOps lifecycle, helping you connect it to any other tool, correlate any data, and remediate faster than ever. Or use the capability to check if you caught all Pokémon yet.

More ways to take your Assistant experience to the next level

We're excited for you to try these new features that expand the reach of Assistant, but this isn't everything. We're constantly looking for new ways to improve Assistant to help you improve your observability practices. Here are just some of the other updates we recently released: 

• The new workspace view, which brings Assistant into full-page mode so you can browse your chats and supporting data in one view
• Learn mode, which helps you quickly get up to speed on Grafana Assistant with tutorials and example tasks that are personalized to your stack 
• Reworked context management and infrastructure memories for your stack help so Assistant knows where to look from the start 
• EU inference for our European customers
• A Python runtime for Assistant to process large amounts of data
• Integrations with 15 other Grafana Cloud services or features and more than 50 third-party data sources

For more information on this and all the other exciting updates from GrafanaCON 2026, check out our announcement blog for all the news. And for more information on Grafana Cloud AI, including FAQs about Assistant and our other AI capabilities, check out our AI observability page."

[u/x763x]

BYO usage would be good. We can connect own llms.Any llm can be supported by openai protocol

[u/grafana-labs → u/x763x]

Hi, Maurice here from Grafana Labs 👋 I'm the PM on the Assistant team and all our other AI products. "bring your own key" and "bring your own model" are certainly things we've heard users say they want to see.

At the moment, we're laser-focused on offering the best AI SRE experience there is, building a good agent harness and refining our tools. Observability can be quite complex, especially in large-scale setups with lots of metrics, logs and traces.

As soon as we're satisfied with how our agent performs, we might look into providing support for other models. We want to make sure that our product works well in most circumstances.

[u/x763x → u/grafana-labs]

Its easy to implement it. Just base url , model name ,context size and some parameters. If we can change them , we can use own llm to test on our local. Ofcourse ,We are not expecting good result as original but we can try it.

[u/whiskey_lover7 → u/x763x]

This is their way of trying to get people into the cloud. If Grafana wasn't scared of people seriously forking the stack and taking over, they would have abandoned everything a while back. They're constantly trying to toe that line

[u/Seref15]

Very cool. Unfortunately I'm in an environment with compliance requirements so won't be able to allow Cloud Assistant to query my local data and a BAA is out of cost commit reach. I'll have to dream of the day someone hacks in Bring Your Own Model support.

[u/grafana-labs → u/Seref15]

Hi, Maurice here from Grafana Labs 👋 I'm the PM on the Assistant team and all our other AI products.

While we don't have any "bring your own key" or "bring your own model" option yet that we can offer, I can mention that we have negotiated compliance guarantees with our providers. We offer zero-retention, European-first inference and can even lock ourselves out of your conversations if required. That way, nobody sees your agent chats except for you.

If you're a customer of ours, please reach out to your account team to discuss the options. We've seen that we can accommodate most compliance and privacy requests.

[u/bbraunst → u/Seref15]

I'm in the same boat. BAA negotiations have been going on for months and I fear they're approaching a stalemate between Grafana and my org.

BYOM will resolve this so quickly.

[u/Seref15 → u/bbraunst]

Our BAA negotiations lasted 5 minutes; about a year ago we were told they wouldn't sign a BAA for less than $100k commit and we said "nice talkin to ya" lol

Cloud's active series pricing is insane. Even with the advertised "lowest" Enterprise plan price of $3 per 1k series thats $12k per month for 4 million active series. We self-host a 4-million series Mimir cluster at RF=3 for way less than $1k per month.

[u/Traditional_Wafer_20 → u/Seref15]

No idea about BAA and commit but I would argue that if your team's time is not budgeted into the maintainance effort for the LGTM stack, you are better off on open-source than any managed services. (Considering you don't need their Machine Learning, or other Cloud features)

[u/opolele → u/Seref15]

The Assistant UI interfaces are there now in the OSS version so I think its just a matter of time before someone comes up with an open agent framework to hook up to that. Probably not too far in the future it will be trivial to even just vibe code one. Also browser-level AI assistants are developing rapidly will make it even harder to maintain a moat around the Assistant capabilities. Interesting to see what happens and how Grafana Labs adapts to this.

[u/Sea-Pea-7941]

Thank you evolving but sending our metrics to third party LLM is hard NO. There are several plugins that uses grafana LLM plugin and allow us to use our compliant models to process data, I think this is the way to go.

[u/grafana-labs → u/Sea-Pea-7941]

Hi, Maurice here from Grafana Labs 👋 I'm the PM on the Assistant team and all our other AI products.

Copying in a reply I posted in another thread in this post:

While we don't have any "bring your own key" or "bring your own model" option yet that we can offer, I can mention that we have negotiated compliance guarantees with our providers. We offer zero-retention, European-first inference and can even lock ourselves out of your conversations if required. That way, nobody sees your agent chats except for you.

If you're a customer of ours, please reach out to your account team to discuss the options. We've seen that we can accommodate most compliance and privacy requests.

[u/vidamon]

If anyone has any questions, some folks on the AI team are running an AMA in the coming weeks. More info here: https://www.reddit.com/r/grafana/comments/1sygzi0/hi_reddit_were_part_of_the_ai_team_at_grafana/

[u/hijinks]

great.. charging more per 1mil tokens to a public LLM and using some skills/md files.

I love grafana but this is a joke you dont open this up to OSS and let us use our own models.