Note
Grafana Assistant Workspace is currently in public preview. Grafana Labs offers limited support, and breaking changes might occur prior to the feature being made generally available.
Grafana Assistant Workspace
Grafana Assistant Workspace is a full-page Assistant experience. It keeps your conversation list, active chat, and canvas visible so you can review history, add context, run investigations, and work with results across multiple conversations in parallel, all in one place.
What you’ll achieve
With Workspace, you can manage multiple Assistant conversations from a dedicated page instead of the narrow sidebar. You can open recent chats, add context from Grafana resources, review canvas output, and work with investigation reports without leaving the conversation.
Before you begin
Before you use Workspace, make sure Grafana Assistant is enabled for your deployment and Workspace is available for your stack.
For investigation workflows, you also need access to Grafana Assistant Investigations. To create a dashboard from canvas output, you need permission to create or write dashboards.
Open Workspace
Workspace is designed for longer conversations and side-by-side analysis. Use it when you want more room than the core Assistant sidebar provides.
To open an existing conversation in Workspace:
- Open Grafana Assistant.
- Open the conversation menu.
- Select Open in Workspace.
When Workspace is open, the standard Assistant sidebar closes and the conversation moves into the full-page layout.
Navigate the layout
Workspace uses a three-column layout so you can keep navigation, chat, and visual output in view at the same time.
- The left column shows your conversation list. Workspace groups conversations by pinned, recent, this week, and earlier items. You can start a new conversation, pin conversations, archive one conversation, or archive all unpinned conversations. You can toggle this column’s visibility with the Open/Close sidebar toggle at the top of the column, or by pressing option/alt+s.
- The center column shows the active chat. This is where starter suggestions, follow-up questions, queued prompts, and shared conversation controls appear.
- The right column is the canvas. Workspace opens it when the conversation produces panels, diagrams, or investigation output, and you can collapse or reopen it as needed. You can toggle this column’s visibility with the Open/Close Canvas toggle at the top of the column, or by pressing option/alt+c.
The chat header also lets you share a conversation. Shared links stay inside your Grafana organization and represent a snapshot of the conversation. If the conversation changes later, update the shared version to include the latest messages.
Add context to a conversation
Workspace keeps the same resource-picking workflow as the core Assistant chat, but makes it easier to keep selected context visible while you work.
Type @ in the prompt field or select Add context to choose resources. From the Workspace picker, you can add data sources, labels, metrics, dashboards, entities, and skills. Selected items appear as tags above the prompt so you can confirm what the Assistant will use.
Workspace also shows context window usage in the prompt area. This helps you see how much room remains in the current conversation context before you send another prompt.
In standard chat conversations, you can attach files and images to a prompt. Use the attachment control, paste files into the prompt, or drag files into chat. Assistant supports PNG, JPEG, GIF, WEBP, JSON, YAML, and plain text attachments. You can attach up to five files per message, with a maximum size of 2 MB per image and 500 KB per text file. In investigation mode, file attachments are not available.
Use the canvas
The canvas is the main feature that separates Workspace from the standard Assistant sidebar. Instead of opening visual output in a separate view, Workspace keeps it beside the conversation.
Panels and Mermaid diagrams appear in the canvas as the Assistant produces them. When the Assistant references a panel in chat, you can focus that item in the canvas directly from the conversation.
When available, panel and query output menus include Download CSV so you can export tabular data from Assistant results. Assistant chat can also show Download CSV for exportable tool output.
The canvas also collects the named outputs a conversation produces, such as reports, dashboards, and query panels, as tabs across the top. Select a tab to open an output, then use its menu to view or download it. When a conversation produces more outputs than fit, use the tab picker to find the rest.
Investigations promote their output into dedicated tabs:
- Report shows the investigation findings and recommended next steps.
- Hypotheses appears when an investigation produces a hypothesis plan.
- Sources appears when the conversation produces panel-based query output.
If you have the required permissions, you can also build and edit Grafana dashboards in the canvas. For more information, refer to Build dashboards in Workspace.
Run investigations in Workspace
Workspace is the main place to start and review Assistant investigations. For a fresh conversation, switch the mode to Investigation before you send the first prompt.
If you don’t see Investigation mode, ask an administrator to grant the Assistant Investigation User role or the grafana-assistant-app.investigations:create permission.
When an investigation is active, Workspace shows progress in chat and builds the report beside the conversation. Hypotheses can appear as a summary card in the conversation and as a dedicated view in the canvas. You can keep steering the investigation from the same conversation while the report is still being assembled.
Before you start an investigation, you can choose a private scope or add one or more Grafana teams. After an investigation starts, you can continue with follow-up questions, pause or resume it, regenerate the report, and open the report in a full-page investigation view.
The investigations list can include Deprecated rows. You can open those rows to review their content, but you start investigations from Workspace or Investigation mode in Assistant chat.
Build dashboards in Workspace
Workspace can create and edit Grafana dashboards in the canvas, so you can build a dashboard in the same place you talk to the Assistant.
Switch the mode to Dashboarding, then describe the dashboard you want. The Assistant adds panels, variables, and layout to a dashboard that renders live in the canvas. You can keep refining it through the conversation, for example, change a visualization, adjust a query, add a variable, or rearrange panels, and the canvas updates as you go. You can also ask the Assistant to load an existing Grafana dashboard into the canvas to edit it.
To build dashboards, you need permission to create or write dashboards (dashboards:create or dashboards:write). If you don’t see Dashboarding mode, ask an administrator to enable it for your stack.
Save a dashboard to Grafana
The dashboard in the canvas is a working draft until you save it. When you’re ready, select Save to Grafana and complete the dialog:
- Title: The dashboard name. This field is required.
- Description: An optional summary shown in dashboard search results.
- Folder: The folder to save into. The default is the General (root) folder.
- Commit message: A note recorded in the dashboard’s version history.
Select Save to Grafana to create a new dashboard, or Save changes to update one you loaded or saved earlier. After the dashboard saves, select Open in Grafana to view it.
Understand how Workspace differs from the core Assistant
Workspace is a conversation surface, not a replacement for every Assistant page and control.
- Use the Assistant homepage and Settings for setup and configuration tasks such as rules, quickstarts, skills, integrations, tokens, and other tenant or user settings.
- Workspace focuses on standard chat, investigations, and dashboarding. It does not expose every mode from the core Assistant surfaces, such as learning mode.
- Workspace currently does not include conversation search in its left conversation column, while the core Assistant conversation picker does.
- Workspace currently does not include the core Assistant’s message-level copy and thumbs up or thumbs down controls on assistant responses.
- Workspace does not include the tutorial entry that is available from the core Assistant menu.
