--- title: Telemetry-driven development: How to gain confidence in... description: As AI coding agents accelerate development, developers lose the deep understanding they once built by writing code themselves. Telemetry-driven development is... canonical: https://daily.dev/posts/telemetry-driven-development-how-to-gain-confidence-in-your-coding-agents-behavior-with-gcx-and-gr-yycj6wsaz twitter:card: summary_large_image twitter:site: @dailydotdev og:type: website og:site_name: daily.dev og:title: Telemetry-driven development: How to gain confidence in your coding agents' behavior with gcx and Grafana MCP | daily.dev og:description: As AI coding agents accelerate development, developers lose the deep understanding they once built by writing code themselves. Telemetry-driven development is... og:url: https://daily.dev/posts/telemetry-driven-development-how-to-gain-confidence-in-your-coding-agents-behavior-with-gcx-and-gr-yycj6wsaz og:image: https://api.daily.dev/og/posts/YYCJ6Wsaz.png og:image:alt: Telemetry-driven development: How to gain confidence in your coding agents' behavior with gcx and Grafana MCP og:image:width: 1200 og:image:height: 630 og:locale: en --- > ## Documentation Index > Fetch the complete documentation index at: https://daily.dev/llms.txt > Use this file to discover all available pages before exploring further. # Telemetry-driven development: How to gain confidence in your coding agents' behavior with gcx and Grafana MCP **[Grafana Labs](https://daily.dev/sources/grafana)** · 11 min read · 1 upvotes · 0 comments ## Summary As AI coding agents accelerate development, developers lose the deep understanding they once built by writing code themselves. Telemetry-driven development is proposed as a way to regain confidence: by connecting coding agents (like Claude Code) to real production telemetry via Grafana's gcx CLI and Grafana MCP server, agents can ground their implementations in actual system behavior rather than assumptions. The workflow covers fetching RED metrics to inform new feature specs, updating dashboards automatically, running local OpenTelemetry setups with the grafana/otel-lgtm Docker image, generating realistic load tests with k6 (including AI-authored test scripts), and creating iterative improvement loops using profiling data. The Tempo team at Grafana Labs already uses an agentic harness that baselines performance, finds hotspots, implements changes, redeploys, and compares results automatically. The end goal is PRs backed by dashboard links and telemetry evidence rather than agent-generated descriptions alone. ## Full article daily.dev links to this article rather than hosting it. Read it at the original source: ## Questions this post answers ### What is the difference between gcx and the Grafana MCP server for connecting coding agents to telemetry? The Grafana MCP server offers opinionated tools for common use cases and can be self-hosted or accessed via a hosted MCP server for Grafana Cloud stacks, while gcx is a more flexible, less opinionated CLI tool that agents can explore to build custom workflows, usable on Grafana Cloud or self-hosted OSS/Enterprise instances. Both are now generally available. _daily.dev surfaces tool comparisons like this for engineers deciding how to wire agents into observability._ ### How can I set up a local Grafana observability stack for testing coding agent changes? Use the grafana/otel-lgtm Docker image to get an out-of-the-box local LGTM (Loki, Grafana, Tempo, Mimir) stack, then configure gcx to interact with that local instance. Production dashboards can be pulled into the local setup with the gcx resources pull command, letting an agent validate metrics against a live local build before merging. _Engineers wiring local observability into agent workflows can track setups like this on daily.dev._ ### How do I install agent skills for k6 load testing? Run the command k6 x agent init followed by the target tool, for example k6 x agent init claude-code, or use --all to install skills for every supported coding tool. These skills teach the agent to author tests from realistic traffic, distinguish test failures from system failures, and analyze trends across runs to propose fixes. _daily.dev helps developers keep up with load-testing workflow changes like k6's agent skills._ ## Similar posts on daily.dev - [Grafana's gcx and MCP Server Reach GA for Telemetry-Driven Agent Development](https://daily.dev/posts/grafana-s-gcx-and-mcp-server-reach-ga-for-telemetry-driven-agent-development-ga8ictzcz) · InfoQ · 1 upvotes · 0 comments - [From signals to savings: Optimizing cloud costs with Grafana Assistant and MCP servers](https://daily.dev/posts/from-signals-to-savings-optimizing-cloud-costs-with-grafana-assistant-and-mcp-servers-qyawb2aet) · Grafana Labs · 2 upvotes · 0 comments - [Bring live Datadog telemetry into your AI agents with native integrations](https://daily.dev/posts/bring-live-datadog-telemetry-into-your-ai-agents-with-native-integrations-rzsh32vdn) · Datadog · 1 upvotes · 0 comments --- Tags: [#ai-agents](https://daily.dev/tags/ai-agents), [#observability](https://daily.dev/tags/observability), [#opentelemetry](https://daily.dev/tags/opentelemetry), [#grafana](https://daily.dev/tags/grafana) [View this post on daily.dev](https://daily.dev/posts/telemetry-driven-development-how-to-gain-confidence-in-your-coding-agents-behavior-with-gcx-and-gr-yycj6wsaz) ```json {"@context":"https://schema.org","@graph":[{"@type":"Organization","@id":"https://daily.dev/#organization","name":"daily.dev","url":"https://daily.dev","logo":{"@type":"ImageObject","url":"https://daily.dev/apple-touch-icon.png","width":180,"height":180},"sameAs":["https://twitter.com/dailydotdev","https://github.com/dailydotdev","https://www.linkedin.com/company/daily-dev-ltd"]},{"@type":"WebSite","@id":"https://daily.dev/#website","url":"https://daily.dev","name":"daily.dev","publisher":{"@id":"https://daily.dev/#organization"},"potentialAction":{"@type":"SearchAction","target":{"@type":"EntryPoint","urlTemplate":"https://daily.dev/search?q={search_term_string}"},"query-input":"required name=search_term_string"}}]} {"@context":"https://schema.org","@type":"TechArticle","headline":"Telemetry-driven development: How to gain confidence in your coding agents' behavior with gcx and Grafana MCP","url":"https://daily.dev/posts/telemetry-driven-development-how-to-gain-confidence-in-your-coding-agents-behavior-with-gcx-and-gr-yycj6wsaz","mainEntityOfPage":{"@type":"WebPage","@id":"https://daily.dev/posts/telemetry-driven-development-how-to-gain-confidence-in-your-coding-agents-behavior-with-gcx-and-gr-yycj6wsaz"},"datePublished":"2026-07-28T19:28:58.520Z","dateModified":"2026-07-28T20:18:13.817Z","description":"As AI coding agents accelerate development, developers lose the deep understanding they once built by writing code themselves. 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