Documentation Grafana Cloud AI and machine learning Assistant Assistant capabilities Automations

Use Automations

Use Automations to save a Grafana Assistant prompt and run it again later, either manually or on a schedule. This is useful for recurring tasks such as daily summaries, repeated checks, or routine follow-up workflows that you want Assistant to handle consistently.

Each automation run creates a dedicated Assistant conversation, so you can inspect results, follow links back to the conversation, and compare runs over time.

What you’ll achieve

• Create reusable Assistant prompts for recurring work.
• Run an automation manually whenever you need it.
• Add a schedule for recurring runs.
• Choose whether an automation is personal or shared across your organization.
• Review recent runs and open the conversation created by each run.

Before you begin

Ensure you have the following:

• Grafana Cloud: Automations are a Grafana Cloud-only feature.

• Grafana Assistant: Assistant must be available for your stack, and any required Assistant terms must be accepted. Depending on your Grafana Cloud agreement, terms acceptance may be handled automatically on first use or by an administrator in plugin settings.

• Permissions: You need RBAC permissions for the scope you want to manage:

  • Personal automations: Full management requires grafana-assistant-app.automations.user:* (read, create, write, delete).
  • Everybody automations: Full management requires grafana-assistant-app.automations.tenant:* (read, create, write, delete).
  • All automations: The Assistant Admin role includes grafana-assistant-app.automations:read and grafana-assistant-app.automations:write. These permissions let administrators view and edit every automation in the stack, including another user’s private automation.
  • Plugin access: plugins.app:access scoped to plugins:id:grafana-assistant-app.

  Refer to Manage Assistant access with RBAC for details on assigning roles.

• Skills (optional): Install or create Skills if you want to reference reusable instructions with a /slash-command at the start of an automation prompt.

Open Automations

Open Grafana Assistant, then select Automations from the Assistant navigation.

The Automations page lets you create, edit, enable, disable, run, and delete automations. Each card surfaces the most important runtime details at a glance:

• Whether the automation is Enabled or Disabled.
• Whether it is Just me, Private, or for Everybody.
• The schedule, or Manual only when no schedule is configured.
• The next scheduled run, when applicable.

Administrators who can view all automations also see who created automations they don’t own. Open an automation to see who last edited it when that person differs from its creator.

The page opens with Just me selected when you can read both personal and shared automations. Select All to include other users’ private automations when you have tenant-wide read access.

Create an automation

To create an automation:

1. Open Grafana Assistant, then go to Settings > Automations.
2. Click New automation.
3. Enter a Name so the automation is easy to recognize later, and an optional Description for extra context.
4. Select a Visibility: Just me or Everybody. The options shown depend on your RBAC permissions.
5. Set a Schedule, either visually or as a cron expression. Leave it empty for manual-only automations.
6. Set a Timezone for the schedule, in IANA format, for example, America/New_York or UTC.
7. Write the Prompt Grafana Assistant should run. To start with a Skill, prefix the prompt with /<YOUR_SKILL_NAME>.
8. Expand Notifications and select Slack, Webhook, or Email if you want updates when the automation runs. Leave the destination set to None for no notifications.
9. Toggle Enabled on so the automation runs on its schedule. Disabled automations can still be run manually.
10. Click Save.

Schedule format

Schedules use the standard 5-field cron format (minute hour day-of-month month day-of-week) interpreted in the timezone you select. Use the Visual mode to build a schedule with dropdowns, or switch to Expression mode to type a cron expression directly. The expression mode also accepts a natural-language description, for example, every weekday at 9 a.m., which is converted to a valid cron expression.

Common examples:

Schedules must be at least 15 minutes apart. Automations are designed for recurring workflows, not high-frequency jobs.

Configure notifications

Expand Notifications when you create or edit an automation, then select a destination. Slack notifications can go to a channel or direct message. Webhook notifications require an HTTP or HTTPS URL and can optionally include an Authorization header or HMAC signing secret. Email notifications go to a list of up to 25 email addresses. To notify a larger audience, use a group or distribution list address.

The form configures one destination at a time. If an automation was configured through the API to notify several destinations, you can preserve that combination or replace it with a single destination.

Email notifications

Select Email as the destination and add recipient addresses. You can enter addresses one at a time or paste a comma-separated list. Each notification includes the automation name, the run status, how the run was triggered, the run summary, and a link back to the conversation created by the run.

Email notifications must be enabled for your stack. If saving fails with an error that email notifications aren’t available, contact Grafana Support.

Verify webhook signatures

When you configure an HMAC signing secret, each webhook request includes the Unix timestamp in X-Assistant-Signature-Timestamp and a lowercase hexadecimal HMAC-SHA256 digest in X-Assistant-Signature. Grafana Assistant calculates the digest as:

text Copy

hex(HMAC-SHA256(<SECRET>, <TIMESTAMP> + ":" + <RAW_REQUEST_BODY>))

Use the request body bytes exactly as received, compare the digest in constant time, and reject timestamps outside an acceptable window to limit replay attacks.

Choose visibility

Automations support two visibility scopes:

• Personal automations appear as Just me to their creator and are hidden from other regular users. Assistant administrators with tenant-wide automation read access can also view them; they appear as Private with creator attribution.
• Everybody automations are visible across the team for users with the right access.

Which options you can create or manage depends on your RBAC permissions. Personal scope requires grafana-assistant-app.automations.user:*, and tenant scope requires grafana-assistant-app.automations.tenant:*. Tenant-wide grafana-assistant-app.automations:read and grafana-assistant-app.automations:write permissions let an administrator view and edit both scopes without changing the automation’s owner.

For team-scoped automations, the resulting conversation is still private to the user who triggered the run. To share the output, the creator or invoker must explicitly share the chat.

Run an automation manually

Manual runs are useful for testing a prompt or triggering an automation outside its schedule.

1. Find the automation on the Automations page.
2. Click Run.
3. Wait for the Run triggered confirmation. Click on the card to view the triggered run.

You can run an automation manually whether it is enabled or disabled.

Tenant-wide read and write access doesn’t let an administrator run another user’s private automation. Manual runs remain limited to the owner of a personal automation and users with permission to run an Everybody automation.

Edit an automation

Update an existing automation when its prompt, schedule, or scope changes.

1. Click on the automation card.
2. Open the More actions menu and click Edit.
3. Update any of the fields, including Name, Description, Visibility, Schedule, Timezone, Prompt, or Enabled.
4. Click Save.

Changes to the schedule or timezone take effect on the next scheduled run.

Assistant administrators can edit any automation, including another user’s private automation. The detail view preserves the original creator and identifies the last editor after an administrator makes a change.

Enable or disable an automation

Use the Enabled switch on the automation card to pause or resume scheduled runs without losing the configuration. Disabled automations don’t run on a schedule but can still be invoked manually with Run.

Delete an automation

Remove an automation when it’s no longer needed. Conversations from previous runs are kept.

1. Click on the automation card.
2. Open the More actions menu and click Delete.
3. Confirm the deletion in the dialog.

Deleting an automation removes its schedule. Conversations created by previous runs are retained.

Tenant-wide automation write access doesn’t grant delete access to another user’s private automation. Deletion continues to use the automation’s scoped delete permission and, for a personal automation, requires ownership.

Review run history

Each automation card has a History view. Click the card to see all recent runs. The history view shows:

Run history and links to run conversations remain private to the owner of a personal automation. An administrator can view and edit another user’s private automation, but can’t view its run history, run conversation link, or private run error details.

Use Skills with automations

Skills work well with automations because they encapsulate reusable instructions and can be invoked with a slash command. To run a skill from an automation, start the prompt with /<YOUR_SKILL_NAME> followed by any extra context.

Example prompt:

/check-cart

Summarize the last 24 hours of error rates and notable log spikes for the checkout service. Highlight anything that breached the SLO.

For more information about creating skills, refer to Create Skills.

Understand how runs behave

Each automation run creates a dedicated Assistant conversation. The conversation is opened with the configured prompt and runs to completion in the background.

• Identity: Automations run using the creator’s Grafana identity, so they can only access the resources that user is authorized to view.
• Conversation ownership: The conversation generated by a run belongs to the user who triggered it, even when the automation is team-scoped.
• Token usage: Automation runs use the creator’s Grafana permissions for resource access, and token usage counts toward the creator’s user token usage. Frequent schedules can add up quickly.
• Failure handling: A failed run is recorded in the History with a failed status. The next scheduled run is unaffected.

Known limitations

• Grafana Cloud only: Automations aren’t available in self-hosted Grafana, even when the plugin is connected to a Grafana Cloud Assistant backend.
• Minimum interval: Schedules must be at least 15 minutes apart.
• Public preview: Behavior, RBAC, and the API surface may change before general availability. Review important automations periodically.
• Conversation ownership: Team automations don’t automatically share the resulting conversation with other users. Sharing must be done manually from the chat.
• Private run history: Tenant-wide automation administration doesn’t expose another user’s personal automation run history, conversation links, or private run error details.

Best practices

Follow these guidelines to keep automations reliable and easy to maintain.

• Start with a self-enclosed prompt that is clear, specific, and repeatable.
• Use manual runs first to validate the prompt before adding a schedule.
• Use Just me while experimenting, then switch to Everybody for shared workflows if your team needs them.
• Avoid frequent schedules unless the automation is important enough to consume Assistant tokens on every run.
• Wrap recurring procedures in a Skill and call it from the automation prompt with a slash command, so updates to the procedure flow into every scheduled run.
• Treat the feature as evolving during public preview and review important automations periodically.

Troubleshoot common issues

Use the following checks when an automation doesn’t behave as expected.

Scheduled runs aren’t firing

• Confirm the automation is Enabled.
• Check the Next run value by clicking on the card. If it’s missing, the schedule maybe invalid; edit the automation and re-enter the cron expression.
• Verify the timezone is a valid IANA timezone, for example, America/New_York.
• Confirm the schedule is at least 15 minutes apart from the previous run.

A run failed

• Open the conversation linked from the History view to see the agent’s last activity and error messages.
• Review the prompt for ambiguous references, missing data sources, or resources the creator no longer has access to.
• Re-run manually to confirm whether the failure is transient.

“Visibility” only shows one option

The visibility options reflect your RBAC permissions. If you only see Just me or only see Everybody, ask an administrator to grant the corresponding scoped grafana-assistant-app.automations.* permissions. The tenant-wide grafana-assistant-app.automations:read and grafana-assistant-app.automations:write permissions are intended for administrators who need to view and edit all automations. Refer to Manage Assistant access with RBAC for the complete permission list.

Next steps

• Create Skills to package reusable instructions you can call from an automation.
• Configure Assistant rules to shape Assistant behavior across automations and chat.
• Manage Assistant access with RBAC to grant the right level of automation access.