Automate all the things: How to use Grafana Cloud’s AI to relieve the operational burden

Continuous integration and continuous delivery (CI/CD) have dramatically changed how we ship software. But once code reaches production, the operational work is still surprisingly manual. Engineers continually monitor systems, investigate unexpected behavior, and decide which issues require action. 

And that is where the next opportunity for AI-driven automation lies.

For example, in today’s CI/CD workflows, someone refreshes the pipeline page to see whether the queue has moved. Someone else reruns a failed test because it is “probably flaky.” Yet another person on the team compares today’s build time with last week’s. And then a fourth person reads through logs, checks recent pull requests, and posts an update in Slack.

And there’s a good reason for this: when the failure is ambiguous, a developer has to stop what they are doing to decide whether it is harmless noise or a reason to hold the release. The problem is that we automated the pipeline, but we didn’t automate the attention it demands.

That gap matters even more today, as teams use AI to produce changes faster. DORA’s 2025 research describes AI as an amplifier: It can improve software delivery throughput, but it also magnifies weak feedback loops and downstream bottlenecks. Essentially, more code moving into a delivery system doesn’t automatically produce more value. And without strong testing, clear feedback, and reliable controls, it can actually lead to more instability.

The next opportunity for automation is therefore not another script that executes a known step. It is an adaptive delivery loop that watches what’s happening, understands what is normal, investigates meaningful exceptions, and gives people the evidence they need to act.

Grafana Cloud’s AI capabilities can help you build that loop. They can:

• Automate recurring operational checks

• Continuously watch production telemetry

• Investigate anomalies across your observability data and connected development tools

• Bring the results back to your team

The goal isn’t to hand over responsibility for operating your production systems. It’s to offload the repetitive work of monitoring, triage, and investigation—without losing accountability. In this blog, I’ll show you how you can do just that with some of the latest updates to Grafana Assistant (including the new Automations, Watchers, and Workspace features), Assistant Investigations, and Agent Observability.

Turn recurring release checks into automations

Many delivery tasks are predictable. You perform the same checks before a release, assemble the same status update every morning, or review the same set of signals after the test suite finishes. The inputs may change, but the process never does.

With Assistant Automations, now generally available, you can save an Assistant prompt and run it manually or on a recurring schedule. Each run gets a dedicated conversation and history, so you can inspect the output instead of losing it in a transient job log. You can also set an automation to notify a Slack channel or send you a direct message when it completes, fails, or needs approval.

For example, let’s say you’re part of a platform team. You could schedule a release-readiness brief for the start of each workday with a prompt like this:

Summarize the operational health of the checkout service over the last 24 hours. Highlight new incidents, recurring alerts, latency regressions, unusual error patterns, and any unresolved investigations. Keep the result under 250 words and lead with the issues most likely to require attention today.

The specific data available depends on how your CI/CD systems and development tools connect to Grafana Cloud. But once the relevant metrics, logs, and context are available to Assistant, your team no longer has to remember the checklist, visit each system, and rewrite the result for everyone else.

This is a small change with an outsized effect, as it gives you everything you need to start your day and frees you from having to compile all the data yourself. And the goal here isn’t to replace engineering judgment. With Automations, you can ensure that judgment starts with a prepared brief rather than an empty browser tab and a scavenger hunt.