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Set up Grafana Assistant in Grafana Cloud

Prepare your stack

Review the required access and setup before you enable Assistant in Grafana Cloud.

  • A Grafana Cloud account: Free tier is enough. Create an account if you need one.
  • You have administrator permissions in your Grafana Cloud stack.
  • You have data sources configured (recommended). Assistant works best with monitoring data in place; refer to Query data for supported data sources.

Enable Assistant in Grafana Cloud

Assistant is enabled at the stack level by a Grafana Cloud stack administrator. The setup flow includes the Assistant terms and conditions, and the setting that turns Assistant on for users with access in your stack.

After an administrator enables Assistant, the sparkle icon appears in the top-right corner of Grafana for users with access in your stack. For full setup instructions, refer to Set up Grafana Assistant in Grafana Cloud.

Note

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

Start your first conversation

Open Assistant in the top-right corner of Grafana or select Assistant from the left navigation menu.

Try the tutorial

When you first open Assistant, the tutorial option appears. It takes you through asking questions, using @ mentions to reference specific data sources and dashboards, and creating and updating dashboards.

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

Run your first query

Start with a simple question to explore your data, for example:

Show me CPU usage for the API service

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

If your stack doesn’t have monitoring data yet, connect a data source first. Assistant works best when it has telemetry to query. Refer to Query data for supported data sources.

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 more specific:

Show me error rates from @my-application-logs

Configure quickstart prompts

Quickstart prompts let you trigger common prompts with one click. Your Grafana administrator can publish team quickstarts in Assistant settings.

Use quickstarts to standardize common prompts for a team or save prompts you reuse in your own work. For full setup instructions, refer to Configure quickstart prompts.

Script

To use Grafana Assistant in Grafana Cloud, you enable it from the Plugins catalog. You need administrator permissions in your Grafana Cloud stack. Once you enable it, the sparkle icon appears in the top-right corner of Grafana for users with access in your stack.

The first time you open Assistant, the tutorial option appears. It walks you through asking questions, using at-mentions to reference specific data sources and dashboards, and creating and updating dashboards. You can access the tutorial again at any time from the chat menu.

For more accurate answers, use the at symbol followed by a data source, dashboard, or panel name to mention it directly in your prompt. Instead of asking to show error rates, try asking for error rates from at my-application-logs. The more specific you are, the better the Assistant targets the right data.

Your administrator can publish quickstart prompts for the whole team in Assistant settings. Quickstart prompts let anyone trigger a common request with a single click, which is useful for standardizing how your team starts common workflows or queries.

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