Named a Leader for the third consecutive year and placed furthest in vision for the second year in a row, the company has had a landmark year of innovation as observability becomes essential infrastructure for teams building and running AI at scale.
NEW YORK--(BUSINESS WIRE)--Grafana Labs, the company behind the open observability cloud, today announced it has been named a Leader in the Gartner® Magic Quadrant™ for Observability Platforms for the third consecutive year, and positioned furthest on the Completeness of Vision axis for the second year running.
We believe this placement reflects where the market is headed: toward open, composable observability that helps teams in the AI era understand systems that are increasingly complex and agentic, and rapidly scaling thanks to AI-assisted engineering.
A Platform Built for the AI Era
According to Grafana Labs’ 2026 Observability Survey, operational complexity and overhead are now the top observability challenge, even as adoption of managed observability continues to climb, with half of organizations now using managed observability in some form (up from 43% in 2025). Telemetry keeps growing, systems keep getting more distributed, and teams are tired of paying twice: once for data they do not need, and again in engineering time when something breaks, and nobody can see the full picture. What changed in the last year is the scale of that problem. AI has become production infrastructure with its own failure modes, cost curves, and accountability questions, while the people operating these systems still need to move faster than dashboards alone allow.
Observability has to serve both sides of the AI shift. Teams need to observe AI, from LLMs and agents to inference pipelines and the applications wrapped around them. And they need observability that uses AI responsibly to shorten investigations, not replace judgment. That demand is showing up across energy, manufacturing, media, and retail, and increasingly among AI-native companies running production AI workloads on Grafana Cloud.
That’s why over the past year, Grafana Labs expanded Grafana Cloud to help teams run complex systems, observe AI in production, and use AI to move faster on an open platform where observability spend scales with value, not volume.
- AI inside the platform: Grafana Assistant puts a conversational AI layer inside Grafana Cloud that answers questions about your systems using the telemetry you already have, enriched by the Knowledge Graph, which connects signals to services, dependencies, and changes. Assistant Investigations goes further, automatically correlating alerts and surfacing root causes before an on-call engineer finishes reading the page.
- Built for agents and humans: Grafana Cloud CLI (gcx) and a remotely hosted MCP server give AI agents native access to Grafana Cloud, the same capabilities engineers use in the UI, at machine speed. Skills extend that production context into coding tools like Claude Code and Cursor.
- Observability for AI systems: Grafana Cloud AI Observability brings the same discipline to LLMs and agents that Grafana has always applied to infrastructure: monitoring performance, token usage, latency, drift, and agent decision traces alongside the rest of the stack. Grafana Labs also recently announced o11y-bench, an open-source benchmark for evaluating AI agents on real-world observability and SRE tasks. Notably, in the 2026 Gartner® Critical Capabilities for Observability Platforms, which is a companion of Magic Quadrant report, and provides evaluation across Use Cases, Grafana Cloud scored 4.4/5 for AI/LLM Observability.
- Cost control at AI scale: Adaptive Telemetry, across logs, metrics, traces, and profiles, lets teams keep high-value signals while cutting noise and optimizing costs as AI workloads add new data types and volume.
- Open by design: In the AI era, openness is a practical requirement: agents are only as good as the context they can reach. Grafana is built on OpenTelemetry, open APIs, and MCP interfaces, so your telemetry stays yours and is accessible to humans and agents alike.
“We believe being recognized as a Leader for the third year running – and furthest in Completeness of Vision for the second – reflects not just where we are today, but where the market is heading, and I am extremely proud of the organisation's continued ability to innovate and adapt to meet our users' needs,” said Anthony Woods, Co-Founder, Grafana Labs. “Observability is no longer just about metrics, logs, and traces. It is about intelligence, automation, and giving every team the ability to understand their systems at any scale. That includes the teams operating AI in production and the AI-native companies building the next generation of applications on top of it. Our job is to meet both with an open platform, actually useful AI workflows, and the visibility that their complex systems have been missing.”
What Customers Are Saying
Customers span various industries and sectors, including Anthropic, ASOS, Citigroup, Lovable, NVIDIA, Salesforce, and Microsoft, which rely on Grafana to monitor and understand complex systems at a global scale. While we are honored to be named a Leader by Gartner, the most important feedback comes from the people using Grafana every day.
As of June 25, 2026, Grafana Labs holds an overall rating of 4.5 out of 5 on Gartner Peer Insights™, based on 618 verified customer reviews, with 90% of reviewers saying they would recommend Grafana Labs products. Here's what customers are saying:
- “Our transition to Grafana Cloud has been a significant force multiplier for our DevOps team. By moving away from managing our own backend storage, we've reclaimed valuable engineering hours.” — IT Manager, Energy & Utilities Industry
- “Grafana [Cloud] provides an amazing single pane of glass for our full observability stack.” — Solutions Engineer, IT Services Industry
- “The AI agent and assistant are amazing. Adaptive Metrics let[s] us control metrics [on] the server side.” — IT Manager, Services Industry
- “I really like how easy it is to use. I also think it's a great product with rich features like the SRE AI Agent and on-call functions.” — Software Developer, $30B+ IT Services Company
- “One of my best observability tools at this point. Grafana Cloud fits all my observability needs, from dashboards, to explore, to alerts.” — Engineer, Media Industry
Resources
- Read the full Gartner Magic Quadrant report here
- Try Grafana Cloud today, using the generous free tier
Gartner Disclaimer
Gartner, Magic Quadrant for Observability Platforms, Padraig Byrne, Pankaj Prasad, Martin Caren, D.B. Cummings, Tanmay Bisht, July 2026.
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About Grafana Labs
Grafana Labs, the company behind the open observability cloud, is founded on the principles of open source, open standards, open ecosystems, and open culture. Grafana Cloud, our fully managed observability platform, is flexible and built for scale. With Grafana Cloud's actually useful AI, organizations can see, understand, and act on all their disparate data to move at the speed of their ambitions, while getting the visibility they need to run AI systems reliably and at scale. Today, more than 35 million users and 7,000+ customers – including Anthropic, Bloomberg, NVIDIA, Microsoft, and Salesforce – trust Grafana Labs to ensure reliability of their applications and systems, resolve incidents quickly, and optimize their telemetry to reduce noise and cost. We are a 100% remote company with 1,600+ team members across 40+ countries, and we’re backed by leading investors including Lightspeed Venture Partners, Sequoia Capital, GIC, Coatue, J.P. Morgan, CapitalG, and Lead Edge Capital. Learn more at grafana.com and follow us on LinkedIn and X.
Contacts
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