Add skills to agents: Use Assistant playbooks for faster answers, investigations
Blog post from Grafana Labs
Grafana Assistant has introduced playbooks, a new feature designed to integrate AI into existing observability practices, enhancing the efficiency and consistency of incident investigations. Playbooks are structured as simple documents containing titles and instructions, allowing users to encode their organization's operational expertise directly into Grafana Cloud. This tool supports the creation of reusable commands, enabling complex investigation flows to be executed with a single prompt, and can be customized for either individual workflows or broader team applications. Playbooks can also incorporate contextual elements like dashboards and queries, ensuring agents have the necessary resources at their disposal. They differ from rules, which are always applied, by being activated based on user prompts and investigation findings. Best practices include keeping playbooks concise, updating them after major incidents, and experimenting with them before wider deployment. This feature is particularly beneficial for teams with existing complex systems, as it operationalizes their collective SRE knowledge and streamlines investigations.