What is gcx

Grafana's official CLI for managing Grafana Cloud/Enterprise/OSS resources, optimized for agentic usage — dashboards, alerts, SLOs, metrics/logs/traces/profiles queries, and every major Cloud product, plus a bundled Agent Skills set for Claude Code and other .agents-compatible harnesses.

gcx (grafana/gcx) is Grafana’s official command-line tool for Grafana Cloud, Enterprise, and OSS (Grafana 12+). It’s explicitly built “optimized for agentic usage” — the same access What is Grafana MCP gives an agent over MCP, but as a CLI binary a coding agent can shell out to directly, with human-usable output alongside it. Currently public preview, Apache 2.0, ~420 stars.

What it actually covers

gcx isn’t just dashboards-and-alerts — it’s the single CLI surface for nearly every Grafana Cloud product:

Domain	Command prefix
Dashboards / folders (resources)	`gcx resources`
Alert rules	`gcx alert`
Metrics / logs / traces / profiles	`gcx metrics`, `gcx logs`, `gcx traces`, `gcx profiles`
SLOs	`gcx slo`
Synthetic Monitoring	`gcx synthetic-monitoring`
IRM (on-call, incidents)	`gcx irm`
k6 Cloud (load testing)	`gcx k6`
Fleet Management (collectors)	`gcx fleet`
Knowledge Graph	`gcx kg`
Adaptive Metrics / Logs / Traces	`gcx metrics adaptive`, etc.
Grafana Assistant	`gcx assistant`
Raw API passthrough	`gcx api`
Observability as Code (scaffold/import)	`gcx dev`

$ gcx metrics query 'sum by (handler)(rate(grafana_http_request_duration_seconds_count[5m]))' --since 1h
┌──────────────┬───────────────────────┬─────────┐
│ INSTANCE     │ TIMESTAMP             │ VALUE   │
├──────────────┼───────────────────────┼─────────┤
│ localhost... │ 2026-04-28T11:59:00.. │ 0.00730 │
└──────────────┴───────────────────────┴─────────┘

$ gcx alert rules list --state firing
$ gcx slo definitions list

Compatibility matrix — not everything works everywhere

Feature availability is gated by deployment type, which matters if this ever gets pointed at self-hosted vs. Cloud:

Feature	OSS (12+)	Enterprise (12+)	Cloud	BYOC
Resource management, alert rules, raw API, Obs-as-Code	✓	✓	✓	✓
Signal queries (metrics/logs/traces/profiles)†	✓	✓	✓	✓
SLO / Synthetic Monitoring / IRM / k6 / Fleet	✗	✗	✓	◐
Adaptive Metrics / Logs / Traces	✗	✗	✓	◐
Grafana Assistant	✗	✗	✓	✗

† Self-hosted signal queries work against Prometheus/Loki/Tempo/Pyroscope directly, but endpoints must be configured manually — Cloud auto-discovers them from the stack.

Resource GitOps: the piece worth calling out

gcx resources pull / gcx resources push turn dashboards and folders into local files an agent (or a human) can edit and diff, then push back — the same What is GitOps pull/reconcile shape applied to Grafana configuration instead of Kubernetes manifests:

gcx resources pull dashboards -p ./resources -o yaml
gcx resources validate -p ./resources
gcx resources push -p ./resources --dry-run   # preview
gcx resources push -p ./resources             # apply

This is a direct, practical answer to “how do dashboards get version-controlled and reviewed like code” without hand-rolling a Terraform provider or a custom export script.

Auth: two token types, and it matters which one

Grafana service account token (glsa_…, Editor/Admin role) — required for all deployment types, authenticates against the Grafana HTTP API itself. Same token type What is Grafana MCP uses.
Cloud Access Policy token (glc_…) — required in addition for Cloud product commands (slo, irm, synthetic-monitoring, Adaptive *, assistant). This is the same glc_-vs-glsa_ distinction that trips up Alloy remote-write auth — gcx just makes both tokens explicit inputs to gcx login rather than one implicit config value.

gcx vs. grafana-mcp — different transport, overlapping intent

Axis	`gcx`	What is Grafana MCP
Transport	CLI binary, shell-invoked	MCP server, protocol-invoked (stdio or remote HTTP)
Best fit	An agent that can execute shell commands (Claude Code, Codex, OpenCode)	An MCP-native client/agent without shell access
Product surface	Broader — every Cloud product, plus Adaptive */Assistant	Query + dashboards + alerting + Incident/Sift
Ships with	22 bundled Agent Skills (Claude Code plugin + `.agents` bundle)	No bundled skills — pair with What is Grafana Skills separately

They’re not mutually exclusive — a Claude Code session could use gcx for CLI-driven investigation and resource GitOps while still relying on grafana-mcp (or the hosted MCP endpoint) for a protocol-level integration elsewhere in the same pipeline.

Bundled Agent Skills

gcx agent skills list ships 22 skills covering setup, dashboard creation/GitOps, datasource exploration, alert investigation, structured debugging, SLO management, Synthetic Monitoring, Knowledge Graph diagnosis, project scaffolding, and end-to-end observability rollout. Install via the Claude Code plugin (/plugin marketplace add grafana/gcx) or, for any other .agents-compatible harness, gcx agent skills install --all. This is the same layering What is Grafana Skills describes — gcx is the distribution mechanism, not a separate skills concept.

Why it matters here: this is the most direct current path to giving the h-aiops SRE-agent line (or Claude Code itself) shell-level, agent-first access to the same Grafana Cloud stack this repo’s observability pillar already runs — worth evaluating against grafana-mcp for any workflow where shelling out is acceptable and the broader Cloud-product surface (SLO, IRM, Adaptive *) is actually needed.