gcx is a command-line tool that lets people and AI coding agents manage and inspect Grafana Cloud, Enterprise, and open-source instances. It provides access to dashboards, alerts, SLOs, metrics, logs, and traces, with workflows for alert investigation, dashboard management, GitOps, and observability setup. Its catalogue entries provide agent instructions and extensions for using gcx.
Getting it into your agent
One page per mod, every tool's command on it. A separate URL per tool would split the same page into five that compete with each other.
npx agentmods add skills/grafana/gcx/create-dashboardnpx skills add grafana/gcx --skill create-dashboardgit clone --depth 1 https://github.com/grafana/gcxWrote this? Show the measurements
A badge with what this costs and how it scanned, read live from this page, so it follows the numbers instead of freezing them. Markdown for a README, HTML for a documentation site or a project page.
[](https://agentmods.dev/skills/grafana/gcx/create-dashboard)<a href="https://agentmods.dev/skills/grafana/gcx/create-dashboard"><img src="https://agentmods.dev/badge/skills/grafana/gcx/create-dashboard.svg" alt="Measured on agentmods" height="20"></a>What it costs to keep this loaded
Counted locally with the o200k_base tokenizer, which is exact for GPT models; Claude uses its own tokenizer and its counts differ. Treat this as one consistent yardstick across the catalogue rather than a bill. Prices are per million input tokens.
| Model | Per session | Once invoked |
|---|---|---|
| Fable 5.1 | $0.00116 | $0.02892 |
| Opus 5 | $0.00058 | $0.01446 |
| Sonnet 5 | $0.00023 | $0.00578 |
| Haiku 4.5 | $0.00012 | $0.00289 |
Grade A, and why
create-dashboard scanned grade A with 0 findings against 26 rules in 11 categories — prompt injection, anti-refusal, data exfiltration, privilege escalation, supply chain, agent snooping, system-prompt leakage, SSRF and excessive agency — measured 6d ago.
A static scan of the body, not an audit. Every finding is printed with the line that produced it so you can judge whether it matters here. A mod is markdown that instructs an agent; that is exactly why what it instructs is worth reading.
Nothing flagged
None of the 26 patterns this scan looks for appear in this file: no shell pipes, no recursive deletes, no credential paths, no hidden text, no instruction-override or anti-refusal phrasing, no agent-config snooping. That is not a guarantee, it is the absence of the things that are checkable.
How it starts
The opening of the file, as written. The whole thing — 303 lines — stays where its author put it; the contents beside it link to each section on GitHub.
Create Dashboard
Create dashboards as an iterative product workflow, not as a one-shot manifest write. The loop is:
understand goal → discover data → author dashboard → validate/push → snapshot → inspect → revise
A dashboard creation task is not complete after push succeeds. It is complete
only after the dashboard has been visually checked, or after you report exactly
why the snapshot step is blocked.
For pure operations on existing dashboards — list, search, pull, push, promote,
restore, delete, or one-off snapshot — use manage-dashboards instead.
Hard Rules
- Do not create dashboards in an arbitrary/default folder. If the target context or folder is ambiguous and the operation will write to Grafana, ask one concise question.
- If the user gives a context, folder, datasource, or dashboard title, proceed with stated assumptions instead of running a long clarification round.
- Verify the active gcx context before writes.
- Verify datasources, metrics, labels, and log fields before adding panels. Do not invent PromQL, LogQL, datasource UIDs, label names, or folder UIDs.
- Prefer existing project conventions. If the repo already has grafana-foundation-sdk builders, generated manifests, or a dashboards registry, follow that pattern.
- Use
gcx dashboards snapshotfor visual feedback. After rendering a PNG, inspect the image with the available image/read tool; do not only report the file path. - Iterate at least once after the first snapshot when there are obvious visual or data problems: login page, wrong variables, empty prime panels, title truncation, broken layout, unreadable legends, or poor top-screen triage.
- Prefer dedicated gcx commands over
gcx api. Use raw API only when a needed operation has no dedicated command.
Inputs to Establish
Collect only the missing inputs needed to start:
| Input | Needed for | Default if user is vague |
|---|---|---|
| Grafana context | Any read/write | Active gcx context after gcx config current-context |
| Folder | Dashboard creation | Ask; do not default to General silently |
| Audience | Dashboard shape | On-call/SRE triage audience |
| Entity scope | Queries/variables | Service/team/namespace from the user request |
| Datasource(s) | Panel queries | Infer from similar dashboards, then verify |
| Time range | Snapshot and query tests | --since 6h for operational dashboards |
| Storage path | Local files | Existing repo convention, else ./resources/dashboards/<name>.yaml |
What this file has done since we first saw it
Hashed on every crawl. A supply-chain change to an agent config is a question of when, not whether, so the history is kept rather than the latest state alone.
- 6d ago First seen · 303 lines · 116 tokens per session scan A b0a7fa954384
create-dashboard is a skill published in the GitHub repository grafana/gcx (586 stars, last pushed today), licensed Apache-2.0. It adds 116 tokens to every session and 2,892 once invoked, about $0.0006 per session on Opus 5. A static security scan graded it A with 0 findings. No closer match exists in the catalogue, so it is treated as the original; first seen 2026-08-30.
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