# [[How to use Grafana Assistant with self-hosted Grafana]] <iframe width="560" height="315" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/0O0ZqrruGns" title="YouTube video player" frameborder="0" allow="accelerometer; autoplay; clipboard-write; encrypted-media; gyroscope; picture-in-picture" allowfullscreen></iframe> plugins:: "" Related:: "[[Grafana Assistant]], [[Grafana]], [[Grafana 13]], [[Grafana Infinity Datasource plugin]]" ## Pre-production ### Thumbnail ![[How to use Grafana Assistant for Grafana OSS_v2.png]] ### Title 1. ### Hook In case you missed it, possibly the biggest news to come from GrafanaCON is that if you're running self-hosted or open-source Grafana instances, you can now connect them through your Grafana Cloud account to Assistant, the purpose-built AI tool for all things Grafana. In this video, I'm going to show you how to enable it AND use it to go from nothing to THIS dashboard with a single prompt. ### Structure - First some explanations because we're doing something a little different here. - Assistant itself is not open-source. But you can now use it for your self-hosted or open-source Grafana instance. - Now, you will still need to have a Grafana Cloud account and link that to your self-hosted Grafana instance. Think of it this way: Having a Grafana Cloud account (whether it's free or paid) gives you access to use Assistant in OSS too. - Don't worry, I'll show you exactly how that works in this video. - Prerequisites - OSS Grafana v13 or higher - a Grafana Cloud account (generous inclusions on the free tier-- check the pricing here) - Enabling Assistant - Go to plugins, search for Assistant. - Click Install. - Refresh the page. Then go to the Connection tab. - Click Start Connection - Select the organization and stack you want, and then click Authorize connection. - Click Close. - Link Assistant to your Grafana Cloud account - Initial dashboard - Every Grafana instance comes with a test data source: TestData. Enable that. - Ask Assistant to create us a dashboard for server health. ### Outro I've only shown you how Assistant can build dashboards, but Assistant can actually do way more. You can ask it questions about data that you have in Grafana, run investigations to troubleshoot production incidents, learn some skills, manage alerts, teach you how to use Grafana... and this list just keeps growing so stay tuned! If you want to learn more about how we handle your data, or just more details about Assistant, click here. Thanks for watching! ### Related videos and resources ### Pinned comment ``` ``` ### Timestamps 00:00 Intro ## Transcript Speaker 1 (00:00): In case you missed it, possibly the biggest use to come from GrafanaCon is that if you're running self-hosted or open source Grafana instances, you can now connect them through your Grafana Cloud account to assist it, the purpose-built AI tool for all things Grafana. In this video, I'm going to show you how to set all of that up and how you can use Assistant to go from absolutely nothing in your Grafana instance to something like this dashboard with a single prompt. [00:00:30] First some explanations here though, because we are doing something a little bit different. Assistant is not open source. It's just that now you can use it with open source Grafana. Now you will still need a Grafana cloud account. Think of it this way. Having a Grafana Cloud account, whether it's free or paid, will give you access to use assistant in open source Grafana. (00:54): Still confused? Don't worry. I'm going to show you how all of that works in this video. [00:01:00] Let's get started. You will need to use Grafana version 13 or later for this, and you will need a Grafana cloud account. Check the pricing page here though, because we have some pretty generous inclusions for Assistant in just the free tier. Okay. So this is a brand new Grafana instance. I don't have anything on it. Now I'm going to show you how to enable Assistant. First, go over here to administration and plugins, and then we're going to search for Assistant. [00:01:30] Click on that, and then click install here. It'll say that you've installed Grafan Assistant. Now just go ahead and hit the refresh button here, and you should now see this new connection tab here. Now click on start connection. And what this is going to prompt you to do is to log into Grafana Cloud. (01:52): Select your organization and your stack here, and then click Authorize Connection. Now it should say Connection Authorized Successfully. [00:02:00] You can close this tab and return to the Grafana system plugin. Great. Now I've connected to my Grafana cloud account. Now, I want to show you a little bit of what Grafana Assistant can do, but I don't have any data in this brand new Grafana instance. Luckily, every Grafana instance does have a kind of test data source here called test data. So we're going to go ahead and enable that. So let's go to data sources here. We're going to add a data source and [00:02:30] whoops, there it is. Test data. I'm going to click it. Data source has been added. I'm going to save and test just in case, and yes, it is working. All right. Now we can see that on the upper right-hand corner here, there's a new icon for Grafana Assistant. (02:45): So let's open it up. Great. Now I'm just going to type in here in natural language the way that I would to a human. So I'll say, hi, assistant. Could you create a server health dashboard [00:03:00] for me using the test data data source? Now, if I had some specific things that I wanted to see in this dashboard, like a certain kind of panel or some information to be displayed, then I could ask assistant to do that too. But for right now, I just want to see what it's going to come up with. Since I'm asking for a dashboard, I'm going to choose a different mode here from assistant, which is the general one to dashboarding. The dashboarding mode is good for creating and managing Grafana dashboards, [00:03:30] which is exactly what I want here. So I'm going to send that now. (03:38): Looks like Assistant is already showing us the CPU memory disk and network statistics and memory usage over time and network traffic over time. So this is a pretty good place to start. And if there's ever something that isn't quite right, I can always go into that panel and edit that query myself. Now, I love this because [00:04:00] it means that I'm no longer starting from scratch. Assistant can get me 80% of the way there at least in its initial pass, and then I can ask it to tweak some things or edit things manually myself. Now, I only showed you how assistant can create dashboards, but it can actually do way more than that. You can ask it questions about your data that's in Grafana. It can learn new skills and even teach you Grafana. That list is continually growing, so stay tuned. [00:04:30] If you'd like to learn about privacy and how we handle your data, click on this link here. (04:35): And if you want to learn more about Grafana Assistant, maybe check out the keynote where it was announced over on this side. Thanks for watching.