GrafanaCON 2026 Golden Grot Awards Ceremony: Aurora Chaser, Blue Ghost Mission 1, AI Innovations

The fifth annual Golden Grot Awards at GrafanaCON 2026 — celebrating the most outstanding dashboards and AI-powered observability projects from the Grafana community.

This year's ceremony covers four winners across two categories. In the personal dashboard category: Mohamed Adem (DRW) wins for Aurora Chaser, a Grafana dashboard that combines NOAA solar wind data, K-index, Bz component, Open-Meteo cloud cover, and NASA sun imagery into a single go/no-go score for Northern Lights visibility. Jackson Sweeney (Firefly Aerospace) wins for the thermal monitoring dashboard used during Blue Ghost Mission 1 — tracking 500+ telemetry points across temperatures, heaters, and battery systems during the first commercial lunar lander to successfully touch down on the Moon on March 2, 2025. In the new AI innovation category: Oren Lion (TeleTracking) wins for using Grafana Assistant to compress the incident response lifecycle at a healthcare patient-flow platform, cutting investigation and post-incident reporting from days to minutes. Dhananjay Yadav (NeoSapien) wins for using Grafana Cloud and Grafana Assistant Investigations to monitor latency, discard rates, and per-user cost across a privacy-first AI wearable that processes all-day conversations through a Kafka-backed, four-service speech-to-text and LLM pipeline — without storing any audio.

0:00 Introduction
0:50 Aurora Chaser: Tracking the Northern Lights (Mohamed Adem)
8:47 Blue Ghost Mission 1: Dashboards for a Moon Landing (Jackson Sweeney)
15:40 Pioneering AI in Observability: Grafana Assistant for Incident Response (Oren Lion, TeleTracking)
26:03 Excellence in AI Observability: Observability for an AI Wearable (Dhananjay Yadav, NeoSapien)

Links/resources:
Learn about the Golden Grot awards: https://grafana.com/golden-grot-awards/?src=yt
Read the announcement blog: https://grafana.com/blog/grafanacon-2026-announcements/?src=yt&plcmt=featured/#introducing-the-2026-golden-grot-awards-winners
Get started with the Grafana Cloud forever-free tier: https://grafana.com/g/cloud
Have a question? Ask Grot, your AI helper: https://grafana.com/grot/
Reach out in our community forums: https://gra.fan/communityyf

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