Observability & AI
Grafana Assistant Now Connects 30+ Data Sources Through Natural Language Queries
Grafana Labs has broadened its AI-powered assistant to query across three dozen platforms, letting teams investigate incidents without toggling between tools.
InfoQ
Grafana Labs has enhanced its observability assistant to reach across more than 30 different data sources using natural language prompts. The expansion lets operators, developers, and SREs gather and correlate information from multiple systems in a single conversation—a shift aimed at streamlining incident investigation and troubleshooting in distributed environments.
The Fragmentation Problem#
Modern production stacks are rarely unified. Teams typically scatter their telemetry across cloud platforms, databases, tracing systems, monitoring backends, issue trackers, and infrastructure tools. When something breaks, engineers traditionally jump between these systems manually, matching timestamps and reconstructing dependencies to understand what went wrong. This context-switching and manual piecing-together of information slows response times and increases the cognitive load on operations teams.
How Grafana's Approach Differs#
Rather than asking users to learn multiple query languages—PromQL, LogQL, SQL, TraceQL—Grafana Assistant translates plain-English questions into the appropriate queries for each backend. The system respects existing access controls and role-based permissions, ensuring engineers only see data they're authorized to access. The assistant also goes beyond simple lookup: it can draft dashboards, build complex monitoring queries, clarify unfamiliar metrics, and launch investigations using telemetry from across an organization's stack.
Expanding Coverage#
The latest release adds support for enterprise platforms including Snowflake, Oracle, Elasticsearch, Dynatrace, Honeycomb, MongoDB, Zabbix, and Jira. This breadth allows operational, infrastructure, and business context to live in a single conversation thread, eliminating the need to manually coordinate information across domains.
Competitive Landscape#
Grafana's push reflects a broader shift in observability: vendors are increasingly differentiating on AI capabilities rather than data collection alone. Datadog's Bits AI handles automated root-cause analysis, Dynatrace's Davis AI combines causal reasoning with automation for faster incident response, Splunk integrates AI into security and observability workflows, and New Relic's Intelligent Observability automatically correlates telemetry and recommends fixes.
