How to use Grafana Assistant with self-hosted Grafana

, , , , , ,

In case you missed it, possibly the biggest news to come from GrafanaCON this year is that if you’re running self-hosted or open-source Grafana, you can now connect it through your Grafana Cloud account to Grafana Assistant, the purpose-built AI tool for all things Grafana.

In this short tutorial, I show you how to enable Assistant on a self-hosted Grafana instance and go from nothing to a working server-health dashboard with a single prompt.

A quick note on what “for open source” actually means

Assistant itself isn’t open source. But you can now use it with your self-hosted or open-source Grafana instance. The way it works is:

  • You still need a Grafana Cloud account (the free tier has generous inclusions for Assistant).
  • You link your self-hosted Grafana to that Cloud account.
  • Assistant then lights up inside your OSS instance.

Think of the Grafana Cloud account as the key that unlocks Assistant wherever your Grafana lives.

Prerequisites

  • Grafana OSS v13 or later
  • A Grafana Cloud account (pricing here)

Enabling Assistant

  1. Go to Administration → Plugins, search for Assistant, and click Install.
  2. Refresh the page, then open the Connection tab.
  3. Click Start Connection. You’ll be prompted to log into Grafana Cloud.
  4. Select the organization and stack you want, then click Authorize connection.
  5. Close the tab. Your self-hosted Grafana is now linked to Assistant.

A first dashboard from nothing

Every Grafana instance ships with a TestData data source — perfect for a first run when you don’t yet have real data wired up. Enable it from Data Sources, then open Assistant (the new icon on the top right).

Switch Assistant’s mode from General to Dashboarding — this mode is tuned for creating and managing dashboards — and ask in plain English, for example:

Hi Assistant, could you create a server health dashboard for me using the TestData data source?

What comes back is a starting dashboard with CPU, memory, disk, and network panels already wired up. From there you can tweak panels, edit queries, or ask Assistant to iterate. You’re not starting from scratch — you’re starting from 80%.

What else Assistant can do

I only showed dashboarding in this video, but Assistant can also:

  • Answer questions about the data already in your Grafana
  • Run investigations to troubleshoot production incidents
  • Learn new skills
  • Manage alerts
  • Teach you Grafana

That list keeps growing, so stay tuned.

Resources

See Also