Grafana 13 launched at GrafanaCON 2026 in Barcelona with an AI assistant at its center. But Grafana Labs won't tell you what model powers it.
The Grafana Assistant lives inside Grafana Cloud and helps you build dashboards, customize templates, and work through SQL expressions. It's available now for Grafana OSS and Grafana Enterprise users too. What we don't know is what's actually running under the hood. The release materials are thin on technical details about the underlying models, which is frustrating if you care about how these agents work and what data they're trained on.
The rest of the release piles on features for people who spend their days building dashboards. Suggested dashboards now surface pre-built options matched to your data sources. Prometheus users get compatibility scores showing how much tweaking a dashboard needs before it's useful. Visualization suggestions hit general availability and now pull metadata from data sources to recommend chart types. Saved queries got a refresh with a cleaner interface and the ability to create panels directly from those queries, skipping edit mode entirely.
The query editor got a full redesign. Queries, expressions, and transformations show up as color-coded cards in a sidebar. Each query has its own data source picker now, making multi-source panels less painful to build. There's also a new Graphviz panel for rendering live diagrams from any data source, useful for spotting where a service topology or workflow is breaking.
All practical stuff for teams running observability at scale. But the AI assistant is the story here, and Grafana's silence on what powers it raises questions they'll need to answer eventually.