Documentation Grafana Cloud AI and machine learning Grafana Assistant Workspace

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, 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:

1. Open Grafana Assistant.
2. Open the conversation menu.
3. 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. 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.

Workspace can also promote investigation output into dedicated tabs:

• Canvas shows the main report or structured visual output.
• Hypotheses appears when an investigation produces a hypothesis plan.
• Queries appears when the conversation produces panel-based query output.

If the canvas contains visualization panels and you have the required permissions, Workspace can create a Grafana dashboard from that canvas output.

Run investigations in Workspace

Workspace supports both standard chat conversations and investigation conversations. For new conversations, you can switch on Investigate before you send the first prompt.

When an investigation is active, Workspace shows progress in chat and builds the report in the canvas. Hypotheses can appear as a summary card in the conversation and as a dedicated canvas tab. You can keep steering the investigation from the same conversation while the report is still being assembled.

Workspace also opens existing investigation conversations, so you can return to prior reports and query output from the same full-page view.

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 and investigations. It does not expose the full mode selector from the core Assistant surfaces, such as learning or dashboarding modes.
• 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 currently does not show approval controls for tool actions that require confirmation in the core Assistant chat.
• Workspace does not include the tutorial entry that is available from the core Assistant menu.

Next steps

• Introduction to Grafana Assistant
• Run investigations
• Manage dashboards
• Manage Assistant access with RBAC