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Set up Grafana Assistant in Grafana Cloud

Set up Assistant in your Grafana Cloud stack to start chatting with your observability data.

Before you begin

  • A Grafana Cloud stack
  • Administrator permissions in your Grafana Cloud stack if you need to enable Assistant from plugin settings
  • Data sources (recommended) — Assistant works best with monitoring data configured. Refer to Query data for supported data sources and query types.

Enable Assistant in Grafana Cloud

How you enable Assistant depends on your Grafana Cloud agreement. On Grafana Cloud Free and Pro stacks where Assistant is available, terms acceptance is handled automatically under your existing Grafana Cloud agreement when a user first uses an Assistant feature. Stacks that require supplemental AI terms must be enabled from plugin settings by an administrator.

Use plugin settings when your stack shows the Enable Assistant page:

  1. Navigate to Administration > Plugins and data > Plugins.
  2. Search for Grafana Assistant or go directly to /plugins/grafana-assistant-app.
  3. Open the Enable Assistant page.
  4. If prompted, review the terms and conditions.
  5. Select the Assistant enabled or Enable Assistant checkbox.
  6. Click Save.

After Assistant is available or enabled, the sparkle icon appears in the top-right corner of Grafana for users with access in your stack.

Note

Assistant can appear in the Plugins catalog before it’s enabled. You don’t send data to any AI provider until a user actively uses an Assistant feature.

Try the tutorial

When you first open Grafana Assistant, you’ll see the tutorial option. It takes you through asking questions about your systems, using @ mentions to reference specific data sources and dashboards, creating and updating dashboards, and running guided investigations.

To access the tutorial at any time, click Menu in the Assistant chat and select Open tutorial.

Start your first conversation

Open Assistant in the top-right corner of Grafana or select Assistant from the left navigation menu. This opens a chat interface where you can ask questions in natural language.

Your first query

Start with a simple question to explore your data:

Show me CPU usage for the API service

Assistant automatically detects the right data source, generates the query, and presents results with visualizations and insights.

Try different types of requests

Explore the Assistant’s other workflows:

Create a dashboard for monitoring my database performance

Help me build a query to find all error logs from the last hour

Show me dashboards related to Kubernetes monitoring

Why is my application responding slowly?

Use mentions for better results

Type @ in your message to mention a specific data source, dashboard, or panel. Mentions help Assistant query the right data and give more accurate answers.

For example, instead of:

Show me error rates

Be specific:

Show me error rates from @my-application-logs

Provide feedback

After each response, use the thumbs up and thumbs down icons to improve answer quality. When you give a thumbs down, you can provide additional context about what went wrong.

Refer to the privacy and security documentation to learn how Assistant handles your data.

Limit Assistant to specific stacks

Assistant availability depends on your Grafana Cloud stack, agreement, entitlements, and feature flags. Within a stack, use RBAC to control who can open Assistant by scoping plugins.app:access to plugins:id:grafana-assistant-app.

Opt out or disable after testing

If you tried Assistant and prefer not to keep it enabled, you have several options:

  • Avoid use: Assistant doesn’t send data to AI providers until a user actively uses an Assistant feature. Catalog visibility, availability, and terms acceptance don’t send data by themselves.
  • Restrict access with RBAC: Limit who can open Assistant by scoping plugins.app:access to plugins:id:grafana-assistant-app for only the roles you choose. Refer to Manage Assistant access with RBAC.
  • Manage history: Users can archive conversations in the Assistant UI. Administrators can disconnect MCP servers and OAuth integrations that were added for testing.
  • Disable completely where available: Navigate to Administration > Plugins and data > Plugins, search for Grafana Assistant or go directly to /plugins/grafana-assistant-app, clear the Assistant enabled or Enable Assistant checkbox, and click Save.