Individual skill

observability

Use when instrumenting a service from the inside so an incident can be explained from telemetry alone — wiring OpenTelemetry logs, metrics and traces, standing up a Collector, exporting via OTLP, and defining telemetry-driven alerts. NOT outside-in uptime probes, on-call rotation, or who-gets-paged (that is `monitoring`).

skills/observability/SKILL.md

Read pinned source

Source commit d9d6bb338f66cc1e23998585e580a0ea45bbcb82

What was checked

Matches the observed repository HEAD
Yes
Scanner rules are current
No
Repository scan complete
No
Skill scan complete
No
Observed behavior
Not checked yet
Last checked
Nov 6, 2026

These are observations at the recorded commit, not a guarantee of safety. Review the source before running it.

Install this skill

Choose an agent in your Stack or copy a command below. Commands fetch the pinned commit and copy only this skill directory. Existing destinations are refused. Copying a command does not install anything.

An install command is unavailable: current rules, complete repository and skill scans, an eligible behavior level and a permitted license are required.

Repository context

Repository stars (not skill ratings)
561
Repository last updated
Nov 4, 2026
License
MIT

Observed agent integration: No specific integration evidence. Standard SKILL.md installation does not imply verified compatibility.

Files and excerpt

File metadata and permitted, redacted excerpts come from the recorded scan. Source links are pinned to that commit.

Browse files
Read excerpt

# Observability

You are wiring the *inside* view of a service: when something breaks at 3am, an engineer must be able to answer "what happened, where, and why" from telemetry alone — without adding a `console.log` and redeploying into the fire. This skill emits a concrete artifact: SDK init code, instrumentation (spans/metrics/structured logs), a Collector config, and alert rules that the instrumentation makes possible. The outside-in half — is it up, who gets paged — is `../monitoring/SKILL.md`.

## The one rule

**Every signal carries the same correlation identity: `trace_id`, `service.name`, `deployment.environment`.** A log line you cannot pivot to its trace, or a spiking metric you cannot pivot to an exemplar span, doubles your mean-time-to-resolution — you are back to grepping. Three signals that don't share keys are three disconnected tools; three that do are one queryable system. Set the resource once at SDK init, inject `trace_id`/`span_id` into every log, and never emit a metric you can't tie back to a service and environment.

## Start from the operator's questions

Before choosing signals, write **two to four questions on-call must answer during the likely incident**. For example: “Are payment retries recovering?”, “Which dependency and failure class drives exhaustion?”, “Can one payment be charged twice?”, “Which customer-visible operations need intervention now?” Then assign the cheapest signal: metrics say **that/how much**, traces show **where/causal path**, logs explain **why for this event**. If a proposed event or label answers none of the questions, do not emit it.

## The three pillars — when each earns its place