Skill

generate-resource-stubs

Name: generate-resource-stubs
Author: Grafana

generate Go resource stubs

Published by Grafana Updated Jul 15

Covers Grafana Engineering SDK Go

Description

Generates typed Go stub files and grafana-foundation-sdk builder boilerplate for dashboards and alert rules. Use only when the user explicitly asks for stubs, generated resource skeletons, or builder boilerplate. This is scaffolding only; for designing or creating a usable dashboard with datasource discovery and snapshot iteration, use the create-dashboard skill instead. Triggers on "generate stub", "dashboard stub", "create alert rule stub", "foundation-sdk builder", or "builder boilerplate".

SKILL.md

Generate Typed Resource Stubs

Generate ready-to-edit Go files for dashboards and alert rules using gcx dev generate. The generated code uses the grafana-foundation-sdk builder pattern and compiles without modification.

This skill stops at scaffolding. If the task is to decide which dashboard panels, variables, queries, and layout should exist, use create-dashboard after generating the stub.

Quick Start

# Dashboard stub
gcx dev generate dashboards/my-service-overview.go

# Alert rule stub
gcx dev generate alerts/high-cpu-usage.go

# Batch generation
gcx dev generate dashboards/a.go dashboards/b.go alerts/c.go

How Type Inference Works

The resource type is inferred from the immediate parent directory:

Directory	Type
`dashboards/` or `dashboard/`	dashboard
`alerts/`, `alertrules/`, or `alertrule/`	alertrule

Override with --type when the directory doesn't match:

gcx dev generate internal/monitoring/cpu-alert.go --type alertrule

Output

Filename is normalized to snake_case: my-dashboard.go → my_dashboard.go
Function name is CamelCase: my-dashboard → MyDashboard()
Package name is derived from the parent directory

After Generation: Building Real Dashboards

The generated stub is a starting point. See references/foundation-sdk-guide.md for the full builder API reference to customize your dashboards and alerts.

Dashboard Customization Cheat Sheet

import (
    dashboard "github.com/grafana/grafana-foundation-sdk/go/dashboardv2beta1"
    "github.com/grafana/grafana-foundation-sdk/go/prometheus"
    "github.com/grafana/grafana-foundation-sdk/go/timeseries"
)

builder := dashboard.NewDashboardBuilder("My Dashboard").
    Tags([]string{"team:platform", "env:production"}).
    Editable(true).
    // Add a panel
    Panel("requests-panel",
        dashboard.NewPanelBuilder().
            Title("Request Rate").
            Visualization(timeseries.NewVisualizationBuilder()).
            Data(
                dashboard.NewQueryGroupBuilder().
                    Target(
                        dashboard.NewTargetBuilder().Query(
                            prometheus.NewDataqueryBuilder().
                                Expr(`rate(http_requests_total[$__rate_interval])`).
                                LegendFormat("{{method}} {{status}}"),
                        ),
                    ),
            ),
    ).
    // Layout
    AutoGridLayout(
        dashboard.AutoGrid().
            WithItem("requests-panel"),
    )

return dashboard.Manifest("my-dashboard", builder)

Alert Rule Customization Cheat Sheet

import (
    "github.com/grafana/grafana-foundation-sdk/go/alerting"
    "github.com/grafana/grafana-foundation-sdk/go/resource"
)

rule := alerting.NewRuleBuilder("High CPU Usage").
    Condition("A").
    For("5m").
    FolderUID("my-folder").
    RuleGroup("cpu-alerts").
    Labels(map[string]string{
        "severity": "critical",
        "team":     "platform",
    }).
    Annotations(map[string]string{
        "summary":     "CPU usage above 90% for 5 minutes",
        "description": "Instance {{ $labels.instance }} has high CPU usage.",
    })

Common Issues

Issue	Fix
"cannot infer resource type"	Directory name doesn't match known types; use `--type dashboard` or `--type alertrule`
"file already exists"	Delete the existing file first or use a different name
Need to add to registry	Manually add the function call to your `All()` function in `all.go`

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