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
It runs from inside its repository, so the clone comes first — what it calls does not travel with the file alone.
git clone --depth 1 https://github.com/grafana/gcxnpx agentmods add skills/grafana/gcx/slo-manageWrote 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/slo-manage)<a href="https://agentmods.dev/skills/grafana/gcx/slo-manage"><img src="https://agentmods.dev/badge/skills/grafana/gcx/slo-manage/github.svg" alt="Measured on agentmods" height="20"></a>Or the 80×15 button, for a site that already has a row of RSS and ATOM ones. Only the verdict fits; the numbers stay here.
<a href="https://agentmods.dev/skills/grafana/gcx/slo-manage"><img src="https://agentmods.dev/badge/skills/grafana/gcx/slo-manage.svg" alt="Reviewed on agentmods" width="80" height="20"></a>- NVIDIA SkillSpector pass
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 | $0.00053 | $0.01819 |
| Opus 5.5 | $0.00021 | $0.00728 |
| Sonnet 5.5 | $0.00011 | $0.00364 |
| Haiku 4.5 | $0.00005 | $0.00182 |
Grade A, and why
slo-manage 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 14d 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 — 214 lines — stays where its author put it; the contents beside it link to each section on GitHub.
SLO Management
Create, update, sync, and delete SLO definitions using gcx.
Core Principles
- Use gcx commands exclusively — do not call Grafana APIs directly
- Always run
--dry-runbefore any push operation; proceed only if dry-run succeeds - Trust the user's expertise — skip explanations of SLO concepts
- Use
-o jsonfor agent processing; default table/yaml for user display - Auto-resolve datasource UIDs; only ask if auto-discovery fails
Query Type Decision Table
Select query type based on what the user describes:
| User describes | Query type |
|---|---|
| "percentage of successful requests", "success rate", "error rate" | ratio |
| "raw PromQL expression", "custom metric formula" | freeform |
| "metric above/below threshold", "latency under X ms", "availability percentage" | threshold |
Metric-Pattern Decision Table
Use the metric name suffix to pick the query type when the user provides a metric name:
| Metric suffix / type | Query type | Rationale |
|---|---|---|
_total counter |
ratio |
success_total / all_total |
_bucket histogram |
threshold |
use le-bound threshold on quantile |
_gauge or up metric |
threshold |
compare to fixed threshold |
| None of the above | freeform |
last resort only |
Guardrail: Freeform is a last resort. Before choosing freeform, verify the SLI cannot be expressed as ratio or threshold.
Hard requirement: Freeform queries MUST use $__rate_interval in all rate()/increase() calls. Literal ranges like [5m] are rejected by the SLO API.
Workflow 1: Create New SLO
Step 1: Determine query type using the decision table above
Step 2: Resolve destination datasource UID
gcx datasources list --type prometheus
Use the UID from the output. Some stacks do not populate type in the list
response, so the filter can come back empty even though Prometheus datasources
exist — in that case list everything and pick the canonical Grafana Cloud
Prometheus entry (name like grafanacloud-<stack>-prom):
What ships with it
1 file beside SKILL.md in the same directory: the scripts, references and assets a skill reads on demand. Not counted in the per-session cost; read them before you install if any of them is executable.
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.
- 14d ago Changed · +3 lines · -70 tokens per session 0e929018b28a
- 1mo ago Changed · +1 lines 319d16a897e0
- 2mo ago First seen · 210 lines · 123 tokens per session scan A 905086bd432c
slo-manage is a skill published in the GitHub repository grafana/gcx (817 stars, last pushed today), licensed Apache-2.0. It adds 53 tokens to every session and 1,819 once invoked, about $0.0002 per session on Opus 5.5. 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.
slo-manage compared with skills from other repositories
| Mod | Type | Stars | Last push | Licence | Scan | Tokens | Works with |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| slo-managegrafana/gcx | Skill | 817 | today | Apache-2.0 | A | 53 | Claude Code |
| gke-compute-classesgoogle/skills | Skill | 22k | yesterday | Apache-2.0 | A | 83 | Claude Code, Codex |
| gke-workload-securitygoogle/skills | Skill | 22k | yesterday | Apache-2.0 | A | 171 | Claude Code, Codex |
| gke-reliabilitygoogle/skills | Skill | 22k | yesterday | Apache-2.0 | A | 85 | Claude Code, Codex |
| cloud-architectJeffallan/claude-skills | Skill | 12k | 7d ago | MIT | A | 71 | Claude Code |
| nemo-automodel-launcher-configNVIDIA/skills | Skill | 3.9k | yesterday | Apache-2.0 | A | 30 | Claude Code |
| azure-mgmt-botservice-dotnetmicrosoft/skills | Skill | 3.2k | yesterday | MIT | A | 78 | Claude Code |