Operations | Monitoring | ITSM | DevOps | Cloud

When to Use Grafana Assistant vs. MCP vs. GCX: Part 2

When should you reach for Grafana MCP? It’s one of the two “hands” in Grafana’s AI toolkit — and the easy one at that. MCP lets you bring Grafana into the tools you already use, like ChatGPT, Claude, or Cursor, without changing your workflow. No terminal? MCP. Want to stick with your favorite AI tool? MCP. Want easy tool discovery out of the box? MCP. Here’s where it fits, and when to use it — explained by Nicole van der Hoeven.

You Vibe Coded an App...Now What?

"Hey, I built this over the weekend. I want to get it in front of customers." And it always hits architecture, security, and infrastructure. Ross Hendrickson, CTO at Inspectiv, calls that gap the chasm. His team crosses it on Control Plane: AI-written code secured, reviewed, and released in a day. Control Plane combines AWS, GCP, Azure and your own hardware into one virtual cloud shaped to your workloads.

Multi-Agent Orchestration for SRE: AURA Runs a Model per Specialist

Give one agent every tool and every incident is a question of trust. This one hands each job to a worker that can only reach what that job needs. One AURA configuration defines a coordinator and three specialist workers. Qdrant stores the runbooks, Prometheus measures workload health, and Kubernetes provides inspection and remediation, and each of the three is wired to one worker.

Token budgets: capping AI agent and LLM spend

AI costs are changing. As noted by research from EY, outputs that cost just $0.04 in 2023 now cost $1.20, a 30x increase over just three years. It’s worth noting that task operations and complexity have also changed. In 2023, the process was simple. Users input a question, retrieval engines found relevant data, and AI models returned a response. Today, many tasks are handled by orchestrated AI agents capable of much more complex reasoning and analysis.

Why Tracking AI Overviews Is a Data Pipeline Problem, Not a Marketing One

Something quietly moved onto the ops backlog over the past eighteen months. Executives began asking whether the company appears in AI-generated search answers, and the request landed with whoever owns data collection rather than with the people who own the question.

10 Tools To Build Visibility in AI-Driven Answers in 2026

People increasingly ask AI assistants for recommendations before they ever open a website, and Google now answers a large share of searches with an AI Overview. When the assistant names a few options, those are the brands that get considered. Most people never scroll to the sources behind the answer.

Are AI and art in conflict with each other?

I recently heard a song that was written by a girl but sung and composed by AI. It left me confused— I'm not sure if I liked it. I was a bit prejudiced and automatically hated it because it was composed by AI. Similar to many works of AI, it had a rhythm, but it was too repetitive and lacked emotions. This made me think about all the other forms of art that might be created by AI, and it left me with a bitter feeling.

What AI compresses, and What it Amplifies

Adam Berman, VP of Engineering at Semgrep, on the double edge of AI tools for engineering leaders: they compress the distance between an idea and a working prototype, letting him get from exploration to a demoable POC in the gaps between meetings. But that same leverage amplifies risk. One person can spin up 1,000 unowned problems just as fast as they can spin up 1,000 wins. From a Braintrust by Cortex conversation on how AI is changing the job of engineering leadership.