Explore and modify resources with `gcx`

The Grafana CLI allows you to interact with Grafana resources directly from your terminal. You can browse, inspect, update, and delete resources without using the Grafana UI.

Use this approach if you’re an advanced user and want to manage resources more efficiently, or to integrate Grafana operations into automated workflows.

Search resources by relevance

Use the experimental gcx resources search command to find ranked matches from a phrase:

gcx resources search "kubernetes memory problems"

Search returns top matches, without pagination or an exhaustive resource inventory. Scores rank matches in the response.

Prerequisites

You need to enable the Grafana global hybrid search endpoint to use gcx resources search.

On supported Grafana Cloud stacks, gcx resources search can combine text and semantic matching.
On self-managed deployments with the endpoint, only use text matching. Semantic matching isn’t available on-premises.

Your deployment must have default resource types, or you must select types with --resource.

Search for specific resources

Select resource types and exact folder UIDs for a narrower search:

gcx resources search "memory" \
  --resource dashboards.dashboard.grafana.app \
  --resource folders.folder.grafana.app \
  --folder team-platform \
  --limit 10
gcx resources search "memory" --folder general

Repeat --resource to search your selected types instead of the server defaults.

Repeat --folder to match any listed folder UID. Folders match exactly, without descendants; general or --folder '' selects the root folder. The default limit is 50, and the maximum is 200.

Use -o wide to see matching text, or -o json or -o yaml for the full response:

gcx resources search "memory" -o wide
gcx resources search "memory" -o json

Find and delete dashboards using incorrect data sources

To identify and remove production dashboards relying on non-production data sources, use the command below to list dashboard UIDs along with the data source UIDs used in their panels:

gcx resources get dashboards --context prod | jq '.items | map({ uid: .metadata.name, datasources: .spec.panels | map(.datasource.uid)  })'
[
   {
      "uid": "important-production-dashboard",
      "datasources": [
         "mimir-prod"
      ]
   },
   {
      "uid": "test-dashboard-from-dev",
      "datasources": [
         "mimir-dev"
      ]
   },
   {
      "uid": "test-dashboard-from-stg",
      "datasources": [
         "mimir-stg"
      ]
   }
]

Next, identify the dashboards that are using unexpected data sources, and delete them:

gcx resources delete dashboards/test-dashboard-from-stg,test-dashboard-from-dev
✔ 2 resources deleted, 0 errors

Edit remote resources

You can edit resources directly from the default editor, without having to pull them first:

gcx resources edit dashboard/edit-me-please

This command opens the default editor as configured by the EDITOR environment variable, or fall back to ‘vi’ for Linux or ’notepad’ for Windows.

After the editor process terminates, the resource is updated in the Grafana instance targeted by the current context. Note that edition will be cancelled if no changes are written to the file or if the file after edition is empty.