Get observability in your pocket with the Grafana mobile app

When you’re on the go, your phone is often the only observability tool you have. And what you can do with it in the first few minutes matters. 

With the incredible innovation that has gone into mobile CPUs, GPUs and displays, a phone is a powerful device where you can immediately see what’s happening and start acting on it. And the Grafana mobile app now allows you to both see and act. 

The app (available for Android and iOS) has always been good at notifying you of what's happening—alerts, incidents, and on-call schedules, previously under the Grafana IRM name. Now you can also ask questions in natural language, view your dashboards, and take actions across your stack. It is not a smaller, more cramped version of your computer, but a powerful starting point for the first few minutes of an incident. 

Grafana Assistant on your phone

Grafana Assistant is a context-aware agent that can answer questions and take action across your stack. It already lives where you work: as a sidebar chat in the Grafana web UI, in Workspace if you prefer a conversation-focused experience for Grafana, in Slack or Microsoft Teams, or through gcx on the command line. It now runs on your phone, too, with the same conversations and the same abilities. 

What makes Assistant useful is that it never starts from zero. It knows which stack you're in, which dashboard or alert you're looking at, and how your data is shaped. 

With Assistant on your phone, you can:

• Understand alerts and incidents: Catch up on what’s happened, explore what changed, and check whether a problem has occurred before.
• Find relevant dashboards: Ask which dashboards can help you understand an issue and open them right from the conversation.
• Check your on-call schedule: Find out when you’re on rotation without hunting through schedules.
• Launch an investigation: Get Assistant working on a complex issue before you reach your laptop.
• Pick up where you left off: Continue the same conversation on your computer, with the context intact.

Getting started takes just a question. For example, when an alert fires, you can open Assistant directly from it. The alert context is automatically included in the conversation, so you can immediately ask: 

Incidents work the same way, with the conversation pre-seeded with the incident context:

Follow-up questions stay in the same context, so you can narrow down without repeating yourself: 

Assistant can recommend an existing dashboard based on the conversation, allowing you to see it right away. Or you can easily ask:

And when you get back to your computer, you can continue the same conversation without losing any context:

Incident response on the go

Incident response is core to how effective engineering teams work. The app allows you to see alert groups, incidents, and on-call schedules:

You can also see the timeline of an incident, who was paged, and any other details:

If you use several devices, you can choose which of them gets paged in the notifications settings:

The app can answer less pressing questions, too. If you’re thinking about a weekend away at the end of the month and want to know whether you’re on the rotation before you commit, that’s a question Assistant can easily answer:

And when the issue seems complex, you can ask Assistant to kick off an investigation right from your phone. By the time you get to your laptop, there's a report waiting: the hypotheses it pursued, how each one was validated or ruled out, and where that trail led. 

Your dashboards, wherever you are

Dashboards are the workhorses of Grafana. They're what most people open first in the morning, what's on the screen mounted on the office wall, and what a team builds over years as it learns what actually matters about its systems. Those same dashboards now open on your phone. They reflow to fit a small screen, and the ones you've starred come first:

Most dashboard use is a glance. You may have shipped a deploy, and on the train ride home you need to check that the error rate is flat. That's a perfect use case for a phone:

Have a key metric that you want to check regularly? You can add any panel to the app’s home tab showing your preferred data and time frame right after opening the app:

A different way of working, not a smaller one

None of this makes the phone a replacement for a real workstation. If you're trying to correlate five signals across three services to track down a root cause, you want a big screen, a keyboard, and four tabs open. That's not changing, and it shouldn't. 

But the Grafana mobile app gives us a different way of working. Your first question gets asked in a queue for coffee. An investigation is launched from the back of a taxi. More context to understand an issue is gathered while you wait for a train. And the resulting conversations, investigations, dashboards, or acknowledgements are waiting in the Grafana web UI when you finally reach your computer, so that you could continue rather than opening it cold. 

The rename from Grafana IRM to the Grafana app is a statement of direction. In addition to integrating Assistant and dashboards, more of Grafana is on the way as the app grows beyond its IRM roots. What we're building toward is a real window into your stack that happens to live in your pocket.

Grafana Assistant is the easiest way to get started with metrics, logs, traces, dashboards, and more in Grafana Cloud. We have a generous forever-free tier and plans for every use case. Sign up for free now!