Quick Facts
- Grafana launches AI observability capability in public preview to monitor AI agent behavior, inputs, outputs and execution flows
- Company creates dedicated AI organization led by new Director of AI Mat Ryer at GrafanaCON 2026
- AI observability market projected to grow from $1.4 billion in 2023 to $10.7 billion by 2033
Grafana Labs announced a major AI observability initiative at GrafanaCON 2026 in Barcelona, launching new tools to monitor AI agents as enterprises rapidly adopt artificial intelligence systems.
The company introduced AI observability capabilities in public preview for Grafana Cloud. The new feature monitors AI agent behavior, including inputs, outputs and execution flows. Teams can track low-quality responses, policy violations and anomalous activity.
Grafana also launched the Grafana Cloud CLI (GCX), a command-line tool that lets developers invoke the Grafana Assistant directly within environments like Claude Code or GitHub Copilot. This eliminates the need to jump between development environments and Grafana dashboards.
The company expanded its Grafana Assistant AI-powered agent beyond Grafana Cloud to on-premises deployments of Grafana Enterprise. The assistant helps teams monitor, troubleshoot and manage systems through natural language conversations.
“AI breaks in ways traditional observability wasn’t designed for,” said Mat Ryer, Grafana’s new Senior Director of AI. “Latency and errors still matter, but they’re not enough. You also need visibility into correctness, consistency, and shifting agentic behaviours over time.”
Grafana’s 2026 Observability Survey found 15% of respondents expressed skepticism about AI taking autonomous actions without stronger safeguards. Only 49% said autonomous actions provide very valuable or critical benefits.
The AI observability market reached $1.4 billion in 2023 and is projected to grow to $10.7 billion by 2033 at 22.5% compound annual growth rate. Gartner forecasts 40% of enterprise applications will embed AI agents by 2026, up from less than 5% in 2025.
Grafana also open-sourced o11y-bench, a benchmark for evaluating AI agents on observability workflows. The tool runs against real Grafana stacks to measure agent performance on practical tasks.
“AI systems are starting to look a lot like distributed systems did a decade ago: powerful, but difficult to reason about and even harder to operate,” said Jen Villa, Senior Director of Product at Grafana Labs.
The survey found 60% of organizations now characterize their observability practices as mature or expert, up from 41% the previous year. However, only 4% have reached full operational maturity using AI across IT operations.
Most companies run 2-3 observability platforms today, representing 66% of surveyed organizations. Another 18% juggle 4-5 platforms, while 74% of IT leaders say they would consolidate onto a single platform if it met their needs.
Read more: Grafana is trying to close the AI observability gap before enterprise agents reign supreme