Agents have quickly become part of the tech landscape as organizations embrace AI across their businesses. But embracing agents also means embracing the monitoring best practices that have long been part of engineers' workflows: tracking performance, catching errors, and responding to incidents But it doesn't stop there. Agents also introduce new challenges.

You're investigating checkout errors when someone asks who's coordinating the incident. Support needs an update, and another responder is looking for the runbook. You stop what you're doing to get everyone pointed in the same direction. They're all reasonable requests, but each one takes your attention away from understanding the problem. Yes, your team has a process for handling incidents, but carrying it out is another job for someone who's already busy.

You've just finished a deployment, and though your service is up, you start to notice some requests are getting slower. To address the lag, someone—or, more likely, some group of people on your team—needs to watch the dashboards, decide whether the change matters, investigate what happened, and turn the findings into a fix. At each step you're gathering context—and often explaining that context again to the next person or tool.

Today at ObservabilityCON 2026 in San Francisco, we unveiled a range of new Grafana Cloud capabilities designed to reshape cloud economics, bring richer context and deeper visibility across your systems and end-user experiences, and help teams move toward autonomous operations. Check out the keynote to learn more about the latest updates to the open agentic observability cloud, and read on for a quick recap of all the news from ObservabilityCON 2026.

Earlier this year, we launched the Grafana Marketplace, a platform that gives independent software vendors, systems integrators, and developers in the Grafana community a new way to sell and distribute plugins built for Grafana. The Marketplace builds on our existing plugin catalog by enabling third-party partners and developers to earn revenue from their plugins and invest further in their development.