Enterprise Account Executive - Acquisition

Grafana Labs boosts log search as AI telemetry surges. Wed, 21st Oct 2026 (Today) Grafana Labs has added faster full-text search to Grafana Cloud Logs and introduced Adaptive Logs Archive in public preview, as it looks to manage rising telemetry volumes linked to AI use. The search improvements for Grafana Cloud Logs are now generally available, while Adaptive Logs Archive has entered public preview. Grafana Labs also announced broader updates to its Adaptive Telemetry tools for metrics and traces. The changes are aimed at a familiar problem for engineering teams as software output rises and AI systems generate more operational data. Grafana Labs cited survey findings showing that 78% of 300 IT and engineering leaders increased observability spending in the past year, while 73% expect to do so again. The faster search in Grafana Cloud Logs is built on technology from Logline, a business Grafana Labs acquired earlier this year. The feature is designed to help users identify low-frequency values such as request IDs and customer IDs in object storage more quickly, at no extra charge. That matters during operational investigations, when engineers may need to locate a specific log line quickly after receiving an alert. Grafana Labs added that software agents are now sending more queries than human users, increasing pressure on search performance. Jen Villa, Senior Director of Product at Grafana Labs, outlined the company's view of the cost challenge facing observability teams. "The economics of observability only work if you keep the data worth keeping and can dial that up or down as your system's state changes, and that's more true than ever with the explosion in telemetry driven by AI," said Jen Villa, Senior Director of Product at Grafana Labs. "But even the data worth keeping is still massive, so you still need to be able to find what you're looking for in it, fast. Adaptive Telemetry handles the first, and the query performance enhancements we've made in Grafana Cloud Logs handle the second." Search speed Customer DATEV said it had seen a marked reduction in the amount of log data scanned after enabling the Logline-based function. "When I ran our first query on newly submitted logs after enabling Logline, the improvement was clear. We went from processing nearly a terabyte of logs in three minutes to around 100 gigabytes in under three seconds," said Timo Kirzdörfer, OpenTelemetry & Grafana Cloud Admin at DATEV eG. "That represents an 80-90 percent reduction in the volume of logs searched for newly submitted logs, and we saw the results immediately." Alongside the search changes, Grafana Labs expanded the scope of its Adaptive Telemetry software, which recommends which telemetry data should be sampled, aggregated or kept. Customers using several components of the suite have reduced telemetry spending by 30% to 50% on average, according to the company. Adaptive Logs Archive lets teams send logs to their own object storage bucket in an open format instead of storing that data in Grafana Cloud. The aim is to let companies retain infrequently needed logs at lower cost while preserving access for investigations, audits and compliance requests. Grafana Labs also moved Adaptive Metrics Auto-Apply to general availability. The tool automatically applies cardinality-reduction recommendations without requiring manual review of each one, while a setting called Cost Mode is intended to prevent recommendations from increasing the total number of active series. For traces, users can now query traces dropped by Adaptive Traces for up to 24 hours using a trace ID. This is intended to let teams sample more aggressively while still being able to retrieve a specific trace during an investigation. Cost pressure The broader backdrop is a sustained rise in observability spending as companies add more services, software and AI-driven workflows. Engineering teams have long faced a trade-off between retaining enough telemetry for troubleshooting and controlling storage and query costs. Rapid7 said the adaptive tools had reduced the amount of manual analysis needed to identify waste in logs and metrics. "Before, finding waste meant someone manually digging through metric cardinality and log volume, and the job never ended because new services kept adding more. Adaptive Metrics and Adaptive Logs now do that analysis for us," said Carl Eastman, Principal Software Engineer at Rapid7. "They show which metrics and log patterns are never queried and recommend what to aggregate or drop, and we apply those recommendations instead of hunting for them. Our engineers spend their time on the few rules that need human judgment, like dropping debug logs we know are noise, rather than the whole long tail."

Grafana adds AI agent tools & observability updates. Tue, 20th Oct 2026 (Today) Grafana Labs has announced new products and updates for Grafana Cloud focused on AI agents and monitoring AI systems. The releases include the general availability of Agent Observability with OpenTelemetry support, as well as Assistant Watchers. The move comes as more IT and engineering teams put AI tools into pilots and production, according to survey data the company released. Among the new additions, Assistant Watchers are always-on agents that look for changes in telemetry data not covered by pre-set alert rules. Users describe what matters in plain language, and the tool learns normal patterns before flagging changes through Grafana Alerting. Critical findings from Watchers can also trigger an Investigation. The feature is intended to sit alongside threshold-based alerts and help teams spot emerging problems. Grafana also introduced Grafana Managed Sandboxes in public preview. The feature gives Grafana Assistant a controlled cloud environment where it can work with repository code and live telemetry, investigate code in the context of production behaviour, prepare a fix, and open a pull request for human review. Another preview product, Grafana Pages, is aimed at teams that want to build visualisations with fewer layout constraints than a standard dashboard. Existing visualisation components will continue to work within the new format. AI operations The announcements expand Grafana's work on what it describes as agentic operations, in which software agents take on more operational tasks while human teams retain oversight. Grafana Assistant is already embedded in Grafana Cloud, allowing users to query telemetry in natural language, while Assistant Investigations can run longer automated investigations triggered by alerts or incidents. "Teams want agents to take on more of the work, but they need evidence and control at each step," said Mat Ryer, Senior Director of AI, Grafana Labs. "Watchers surface emerging problems, Investigations help diagnose them, and Managed Sandboxes prepare fixes for human review. Together they make Grafana Cloud more autonomous, bringing detection, diagnosis, and proposed action into one workflow, grounded in the team's own telemetry." Survey findings cited by Grafana suggest adoption is moving ahead, but comfort levels vary by use case. In a survey of 300 IT and engineering leaders, 68% said they had moved AI for observability beyond investigation into pilots or production. Meanwhile, 85% said they were comfortable with read-only investigation, while 52% were comfortable with full autonomous remediation. The same survey found that 80% of organisations are building or operating large language model-based features. Yet 45% said they had assembled AI observability from open-source tools, while 25% used a purpose-built product. Watching the agents Grafana's second area of focus is monitoring the behaviour of AI agents once they are in production. Agent Observability, now generally available with OpenTelemetry support, is intended to show what agents are doing, what they cost, and how their behaviour changes over time, using the same standard as the rest of an organisation's systems. With OpenTelemetry support, agent activity can be tracked in the same way as other services in the software stack. That matters because many organisations already use the open standard across their observability tools. Grafana also pointed to separate IDC research on users of its AI tools. According to the study, customers using Grafana Cloud's AI tools reduced mean time to resolution by 63% and spent 46% less of each on-call shift gathering context. One customer, identity security company SailPoint, said it has used Grafana Assistant for telemetry migration work and incident investigations. "I can just ask Grafana a question, leave it in that tab, go do something else, get Slack, get some coffee, and come back to a full investigation," said Juan Carlos Ramirez, Senior Staff DevOps Engineer, SailPoint. "It's personally helped me find spikes in logs that before the Assistant that would've taken me maybe 15, 20 minutes down to maybe five, and that's while I'm doing other things."

Grafana Labs announced new Grafana Cloud features at ObservabilityCON 2026 in San Francisco on October 20, 2026, aimed at helping teams manage fast-growing telemetry as AI workloads scale. Faster full-text search in Grafana Cloud Logs is now generally available at no extra cost. Built on technology from Logline, which Grafana acquired in April 2026, it finds rare values such as request IDs in seconds. DATEV eG said it cut the volume of newly submitted logs searched by 80–90%. Adaptive Logs Archive, now in public preview, lets teams route logs to their own object storage bucket in an open format. Grafana said customers using its Adaptive Telemetry components have cut telemetry spend by 30% to 50% on average.