Grafana Assistant expands to more than 30 data sources. * Craig Risi Software Architect | Game Designer| Writer | Speaker Follow InfoQ on. Grafana Labs has expanded the capabilities of Grafana Assistant, enabling its AI-powered observability assistant to query and correlate data across more than 30 different data sources through natural language. The company claims that this update is a step toward "unified observability", allowing operators, developers, and site reliability engineers (SREs) to investigate incidents, generate queries, and troubleshoot complex distributed systems without switching between multiple monitoring tools. The enhancement builds on Grafana Assistant's broader AI strategy unveiled at GrafanaCON 2026, where the company positioned AI as an operational partner rather than simply a chatbot. By expanding the number of supported data sources, including cloud platforms, databases, observability backends, issue trackers, and infrastructure monitoring systems, Grafana is attempting to eliminate a common challenge facing modern operations teams: fragmented operational data spread across dozens of disconnected platforms. Modern production environments rarely rely on a single monitoring platform. Instead, organizations typically collect metrics, traces, cloud telemetry, infrastructure events, business data, and operational context all from different tools and sources. Traditionally, investigating a production incident has required engineers to move between these tools, correlate timestamps manually, reconstruct service dependencies, and piece together a complete understanding of what happened. Grafana Assistant aims to simplify that process by allowing users to ask natural language questions that span multiple systems simultaneously. Instead of manually constructing queries in PromQL, LogQL, SQL, or TraceQL, engineers can simply describe the problem they are investigating and allow the assistant to retrieve and correlate the relevant information. Unlike general-purpose AI assistants, Grafana Labs claims that Grafana Assistant has been designed specifically for observability workflows. Beyond answering questions, it can generate dashboards, construct complex monitoring queries, explain unfamiliar metrics, navigate Grafana resources, and launch investigations using telemetry from across an organization's infrastructure. With the latest release, support has expanded to include additional enterprise data sources such as Snowflake, Oracle, Elasticsearch, Dynatrace, Honeycomb, MongoDB, Zabbix, and Jira, allowing investigations to incorporate operational, infrastructure, and business context within a single conversation. Rather than forcing users to learn multiple query languages, the idea is that the assistant translates natural language into the appropriate queries while respecting existing permissions and role-based access controls. The announcement reflects broader shifts occurring within observability itself. As distributed systems become more complex and AI-powered applications generate increasing volumes of telemetry, simply collecting data is no longer enough. Operations teams increasingly need intelligent systems capable of correlating information across logs, metrics, traces, profiles, infrastructure events, and application behavior. As a result, like its competitors, Grafana has steadily expanded its AI portfolio throughout 2026, introducing AI Observability for monitoring large language model applications, Model Context Protocol (MCP) support for integrating external AI agents, and making Grafana Assistant available to self-managed Grafana Enterprise and OSS deployments. Grafana's announcement comes as observability vendors increasingly compete on AI capabilities rather than telemetry collection alone. Datadog has expanded its AI-powered Bits AI assistant to perform automated investigations and root cause analysis, while Dynatrace's Davis AI combines causal reasoning with automation to accelerate incident response. Splunk integrates AI Assistant into security and observability workflows, and New Relic has introduced Intelligent Observability features that automatically correlate telemetry and recommend remediation actions. While natural-language interfaces can make investigations faster and more accessible, the quality and accuracy of an assistant's responses remain dependent on several factors, including the completeness of the underlying telemetry, appropriate access permissions, and the ability of AI models to reliably generate and execute queries across diverse and heterogeneous data sources. Craig Risi. Craig Risi is a man of many talents but has no sense of how to use them. He could be out changing the world but prefers to make software instead. He possesses a passion for software design, but more importantly software quality and designing systems in a technically diverse and constantly evolving tech world. Craig is also the writer of the book, Quality By Design: Designing Quality Software Systems, and writes regular articles on his blog sites and various other tech sites around the world. When not playing with software, he can often be found writing, designing board games, or running long distances for no apparent reason.

US quantum computing innovator Quantinuum appoints CLO from GitLab. Robin Schulman joins following company's recent stock market listing 23 July 2026 US quantum computing business Quantinuum has appointed Robin Schulman as chief legal officer following its recent stock market listing. Schulman joins from software company GitLab, where she was CLO and head of corporate affairs. She brings more than two decades of legal and executive leadership experience to the role, helping high-growth tech companies with strategic transformations and public company evolution. She will also serve as company secretary. Broomfield, Colorado-based Quantinuum makes quantum computer systems and counts JP Morgan, Airbus, BMW and HSBC among its customers. The company debuted on the NASDAQ stock exchange in early June, valuing the business at roughly $17bn. Advertisement The company said it had also recently appointed Rory O'Byrne as chief people officer. Rajeeb Hazra, president and CEO of Quantinuum, said: "Both Robin and Rory are highly accomplished leaders who bring deep experience guiding technology companies through periods of transformation. Their proven track records of building high-performing organisations and world-class functions will provide an invaluable benefit to Quantinuum as we continue to scale our business and the commercialisation of quantum computing accelerates." Schulman arrives after six and a half years at GitLab, having previously been CLO at data platform Couchbase and general counsel at IT analytics company New Relic before that. She also had an in-house spell at Adobe Systems as legal counsel, having started her career in private practice at Fenwick & West. LAW OVER BORDERS COMPARATIVE GUIDES The New World of Foreign Direct Investment Law Guide Historic attitudes favouring globalisation are fundamentally changing... | 3yrs. She said: "Quantinuum sits at a fascinating intersection of groundbreaking science and real-world commercial impact, and I could not be more excited to join the team at this important moment in the company's journey. I look forward to partnering with Raj, our board and the leadership team to build a durable foundation that supports Quantinuum's continued growth and long-term success." In other computing-related moves, in April US computer chip giant Intel hired Aparna Bawa as chief legal and people officer from video conferencing platform Zoom, replacing CLO April Miller Boise. And in July last year, US quantum computing and networking company IonQ appointed Paul Dacier as CLO from Quinn Emanuel Urquhart & Sullivan, replacing Stacey Giamalis.