Installing every plugin in the Grafana Cloud catalogue
Value
2.5
■■■□ of 4
Time
7m
active
Elapsed
7m
wall-clock span
Commits
0
from this session
Cost
$1.62
model spend
Tokens
8k
uncached in, plus out
Tool calls
16
by the agent
Outcomes
5
3 left open
Summary
Written by the summariserInstall every plugin available in the Grafana Cloud catalogue onto Rob's robknight Grafana Cloud stack, starting from the gcx skill.
Rob asked for every plugin in the Grafana Cloud catalogue to be installed on his robknight stack, using the gcx skill. gcx had no plugin-install command, so the agent used the grafana.com instance-plugins API with a stored org-admin token. After excluding the 107 entries already present and the built-in debug and graph plugins, 291 remained. The API's roughly 100-request window interrupted the run, so the first 100 installs went through and the remaining 191 were retried one at a time, waiting out each limit. Every install returned HTTP 200 and grafana.com now lists 327 plugins on the stack, but the Grafana instance's own plugin list still showed the original 121 when checked.
What came out of it
- grafana.com instance plugin list for the robknight stack shows 327 plugins: the 36 already present plus 291 newly installed.
- 291 catalogue plugins installed through the grafana.com instance-plugins API, each returning HTTP 200 (first 100 directly, remaining 191 serially after rate-limit waits).
- 107 catalogue entries skipped because already present on the stack; debug and graph skipped as built into Grafana.
- 35 new enterprise plugins were included, among them Datadog, Splunk, ServiceNow and Snowflake; six enterprise plugins were already on the stack.
- Three self-managed enterprise admin apps (GEM, GEL, GET) were installed; the agent noted they have no effect on a Cloud stack.
I wanted to see what would happen if I installed every plugin in the Grafana Cloud catalogue onto my own stack, so I asked my agent to do it, starting from the gcx tooling. gcx has no command for installing plugins, so the work went through the grafana.com instance-plugins API instead.
After skipping the 107 catalogue entries my stack already had, plus the two core plugins built into Grafana that can't be installed, 291 remained. The API allows roughly 100 requests per window, so the first 100 went in straight away. The last 191 were retried one at a time, waiting out each rate limit. Every install succeeded, and grafana.com now lists 327 plugins on the stack: the 36 I already had plus the 291 new ones.
Not all of it is useful to me. The list included 35 new enterprise plugins, among them Datadog, Splunk, ServiceNow and Snowflake, and three self-managed enterprise admin apps for metrics, logs and traces that do nothing on a Cloud stack. I don't know yet whether enterprise plugins add to the bill on this stack, and I haven't decided whether to remove the admin apps or anything else. Removal works through the same API, so nothing is locked in.
The part still open is that the Grafana instance itself was still showing only the original 121 plugins when I last checked. Cloud loads new plugins on its own schedule, sometimes after a restart, so they may simply not have appeared yet. If they're still missing after a while, that's the next thing to look into.
Left open
- The Grafana instance's /api/plugins endpoint still listed only the original 121 plugins at the last check; the new plugins had not yet appeared there.
- Whether the enterprise plugins add billing on this stack was flagged but not confirmed.
- Rob has not decided whether to keep the three self-managed admin apps or any other installed plugins; removal via the grafana.com DELETE endpoint was offered but not requested.