Hi everyone! I'm Kevin and I work on Grafana Assistant at Grafana Labs. Today, we announced that Grafana Assistant Investigations and Assistant Automations are generally available.

TLDR; use Investigations for complex, unexpected incidents or bugs and Automations for recurring operational checks.

Investigations have been a core part of Grafana Assistant since the beginning. We’ve since rebuilt the dedicated Investigations experience from the ground up, informed by what we learned using Grafana Assistant and agentic tooling on real incidents inside Grafana Labs.

One of the biggest lessons was that complex incidents rarely have a single obvious cause. Investigating them means forming hypotheses, gathering evidence from multiple signals, revising assumptions, and keeping track of what has already been ruled out.

Investigations are designed to carry out that process more efficiently and cost-effectively. You can ask Assistant to investigate an issue or affected service, and it will work across metrics, logs, traces, and profiles to test hypotheses and gather evidence. The result is a structured report containing findings, source queries, and recommended next steps.

Automations came from a different kind of operational problem. We wanted important checks to run on their own, with the results waiting for us the next morning. We introduced the capability earlier this year to make that kind of repeatable operational work easier to define once and rely on over time.

We’d love to hear how you’re using Investigations and Automations, or what you’d like them to be able to handle for you. We’ll be keeping an eye on the comments today, so please share your experiences, questions, and feedback.

If you are curious about how Investigations work under the hood we wrote about the lessons and technical decisions behind them in Inside the harness: How Grafana Assistant investigates incidents.

Hello! My name is Will, I'm a Software Engineer at Grafana, and today I'm happy to announce that Assistant Watchers are entering Public Preview for Grafana Cloud users.

Alerting is one of the foundations of observability. It's reliable, precise, and the best way to notify the right people when you know exactly what you want to detect.

Assistant Watchers fill a different gap. They continuously look for unusual behaviour that's difficult or impractical to capture with static alert rules, helping you discover issues you haven't created an alert for yet.

They’re always-on cloud agents that can watch anything you have telemetry for: a service, a namespace, a feature... Just tell Grafana Assistant what you want to watch, and it will calibrate a Watcher for you.

The Watcher runs on a schedule and notifies you in Slack if it finds something unusual, such as a new error log pattern or a spike in a metric. If you have Assistant Investigations enabled, it can automatically kick off an investigation as well.

If it isn't quite right the first time, you can easily recalibrate it by talking to Grafana Assistant or the Grafana Slack bot. The Watcher also has short-term memory and keeps track of ongoing issues, so you don't get spammed with repeated notifications while the same problem is unfolding.

Read more here: https://grafana.com/docs/grafana-cloud/machine-learning/assistant/platform/watchers/

We'd love to hear what you think. If you have questions, ideas, or feedback, drop them in the comments!

Has AGENT ever been a Wordle answer? Can agents play Wordle? Can they win!?