Grafana offers AI assistant for free, warns users not to go mad

Grafana announced at its Barcelona user conference that its AI assistant, previously cloud-only, is now free for on-prem and open source users, though CEO Raj Dutt humorously cautioned against overuse due to cost concerns. Grafana 13 was also unveiled, featuring curated prebuilt dashboards, DORA methodology templates, dynamic dashboards GA, a redesigned query editor, and Git Sync for observability-as-code. Grafana Cloud gains AI Observability for real-time visibility into AI agent behavior including token usage and policy violations. The Loki log aggregator was re-architected with Kafka-based ingestion and a new query engine, reducing redundant writes from 2.3x at petabyte scale. Grafana also hinted at expanding beyond observability into broader business analytics, converging business metrics with observability data.