Grafana

What This Skill Does

The Grafana skill for OpenClaw is a comprehensive technical guide and debugging assistant designed to optimize your Grafana dashboard development and alerting workflows. It encapsulates industry best practices for query construction, dashboard provisioning, variable templating, and data source management. By leveraging this skill, developers can avoid common pitfalls such as inefficient Prometheus queries, incorrect alerting logic, and broken provisioning configurations that often plague complex monitoring setups.

Installation

To install this skill, run the following command in your terminal: clawhub install openclaw/skills/skills/ivangdavila/grafana

Use Cases

• Debugging Query Performance: Use this skill to identify why a dashboard panel is loading slowly or why Prometheus metrics are not displaying as expected.
• Optimizing Dashboards: Get guidance on when to use variables, how to chain them effectively, and how to select the right visualization type (e.g., time series vs. stat).
• Troubleshooting Alerting: Resolve issues where alerts are not firing or are constantly flapping by configuring proper durations and evaluation rules.
• Infrastructure as Code (IaC): Follow best practices for dashboard provisioning to ensure your JSON exports are portable across staging and production environments using data source variables.
• Data Source Security: Understand the difference between server-side and browser-side data source modes to ensure your credentials remain secure while maintaining system performance.

Example Prompts

1. "OpenClaw, help me debug my Grafana dashboard. My multi-value variable isn't working in my regex filter; how do I use $__all correctly?"
2. "Explain the best way to convert a dashboard JSON for provisioning so that the Prometheus data source UID isn't hardcoded."
3. "Why are my Grafana alerts constantly showing as 'Pending' and not sending notifications? Please help me fix the evaluation duration settings."

Tips & Limitations

• Execution Context: Always remember that alert rules are evaluated on the server. If your query relies on a dashboard variable that isn't hardcoded or passed correctly, the alert will fail to execute.
• Sequence Matters: When using transformations, the order of operations significantly impacts the result. Always verify the output of each transformation step in the builder.
• High Cardinality: Be cautious with high-cardinality queries; they can drastically slow down dashboard load times. Use Grafana's built-in tools to filter down to the specific metrics you need.
• Provisioning: Remember that provisioned dashboards are read-only by default. Ensure allowEditing: true is set in your configuration if you need to make frequent adjustments within the UI.