Grafana Labs Makes Assistant Watchers Generally Available in Grafana Cloud

Grafana Labs announced Oct. 20 that Assistant Watchers are generally available in Grafana Cloud and direct OpenTelemetry agent tracing is in public preview, expanding software monitoring and AI agent visibility.

Teams choose the system data they want monitored and describe the task in plain language. Watchers learn patterns in that data and identify changes that preset alert rules might miss. The Watchers release was dated Oct. 19, a day before Grafana presented the updates at ObservabilityCON.

A finding marked critical can start an Assistant Investigation. Watchers identify a change in the selected data, while Investigations help diagnose the problem. The two tools give teams a way to move from detection to examination within Grafana Cloud.

Agent Observability serves a different purpose: helping developers examine the AI agents they run, including their conversations and costs. It has been generally available since July. The newly added option to send traces directly through OpenTelemetry remains in public preview.

That option lets developers send agent traces without using Grafana’s dedicated agent software development kit. They can examine agent activity alongside application logs, metrics and traces.

Grafana Managed Sandboxes is another public preview. It can use repository code and live system data to prepare a proposed software fix for human review. The feature follows the detection and diagnostic tools with a way to prepare a response to a problem they uncover.

Grafana Pages is in public preview as well. It lets teams build custom views from data already connected to Grafana using plain-language requests, giving them another way to display information from their systems.

“Watchers surface emerging problems, Investigations help diagnose them, and Managed Sandboxes prepare fixes for human review,” said Mat Ryer, senior director of AI at Grafana Labs.

Grafana is scheduled to begin billing for Watchers based on Assistant token usage Dec. 1, 2026. There will be no separate charge for each Watcher or each run.