Grafana adds knowledge graph to link telemetry & users

Grafana Labs has added a Knowledge Graph to every Grafana Cloud stack, extending its observability tools from infrastructure to end users.

The release also includes new digital experience monitoring features and updates to Grafana Cloud Incident Response Management, aimed at linking system telemetry, user experience and incident handling in one environment.

Grafana said the Knowledge Graph is designed to give engineering teams and software agents a shared view of relationships across databases, applications, Kubernetes clusters, cloud services, browsers and mobile devices. That shared runtime context can help users trace a problem from a technical fault to the affected service, team and customer.

Richard Lam, director of product at Grafana Labs, said many organisations already collect data from different parts of their technology stack but struggle to connect it.

"Most teams do not have a monitoring problem. They have a technology debt problem: telemetry from every layer and no way to connect it to the customer it affects," Lam said. "Putting a Knowledge Graph in every Grafana Cloud stack, and extending it from the infrastructure all the way to the user, makes unified observability foundational instead of something every team has to assemble on its own, for people and for the agents working beside them."

Grafana said the graph acts as a runtime context layer for Grafana Cloud. It is built from telemetry collected across Grafana's observability products and can be extended with custom entities defined by customers to reflect business-specific services or products.

New functions include the general availability of custom entities, which let teams organise discovered infrastructure into business-relevant groupings. Grafana also introduced a service catalogue with ownership in private preview, bringing in service ownership, on-call schedules and runbooks, and made runtime context for agents generally available.

The update also adds a Cypher query feature intended to let agents retrieve relationships from the graph rather than rebuild context from raw telemetry.

User monitoring

Alongside the Knowledge Graph, Grafana expanded its digital experience monitoring tools to cover browser and mobile interactions more directly. This is intended to close the gap between back-end system health and the customer's actual experience of a product.

Among the additions is Session Replay, now in public preview, which records user sessions in a video-style format so teams can examine what happened when an issue occurred. Mobile Observability, in private preview, extends monitoring to iOS, Android, React Native and Flutter applications through OpenTelemetry software development kits.

Grafana also introduced Critical User Journeys in private preview. The feature allows teams to define which user flows matter most and inspect them from a business metric such as conversion decline through to the underlying technical cause.

Grafana pointed to findings from its survey of 300 IT and engineering leaders conducted with ETR, a Futurum company, which found that 30% were at a stage where they could explain unexpected system behaviour but not detect and prevent issues before users were affected.

Incident response

Grafana also updated its incident response tools as it seeks to address a growing mix of human responders and AI systems working on the same operational problems. Without a shared record, engineers and agents can duplicate investigations during an incident, it said.

New IRM functions include Grafana Workflows, in public preview, described as event-driven automation that connects actions across Grafana Cloud and other tools. Grafana said prebuilt workflow templates cover major incident kickoff, on-call handoff reports and weekly service health summaries.

Operational Context with Knowledge Graph, in private preview, is intended to record what previous responders tried, discovered and ruled out, so later investigations can begin with that information. Response Console, also in private preview, offers a single interface where people and agents can work on incidents using the same Knowledge Graph context.

Neil Wilson, senior director of software engineering at LexisNexis Risk Solutions, said the challenge for operations teams lies less in collecting data than in tying it to ownership and impact.

"The future of operations won't be defined by who collects the most telemetry, but by who can provide the most accurate context. Telemetry tells us what's happening. Context tells us why it matters," Wilson said. "We've found that the hardest part of an investigation is rarely a lack of data. The challenge is connecting service ownership, dependencies, operational knowledge, and customer impact across a complex ecosystem. Entity Graph relationships help make those connections visible, giving engineers and AI systems the context they need to move from data, to understanding, to action."