Observability Skills
A curated collection of 5 observability skills for building with AI coding agents.
Alerting Rules Tuner
Cut alert noise and make every page mean something — rewrite alerting rules to fire on user-felt symptoms (error rate, latency SLO burn, failed requests) instead of causes (high CPU, full disk), with duration windows and severity routing so only urgent, actionable conditions reach a human. Use when on-call is fatigued by low-value pages, when real incidents get missed in the noise, or when alerts fire on causes rather than impact.
Dashboard Designer
Design a service dashboard that answers one question at a glance — is the service healthy, and if not, where's the problem? — by structuring panels around RED/USE instead of dumping every metric. Use when a service has no dashboard, when the existing one is an unreadable metric wall, or during incident-readiness prep.
Distributed Tracing Instrumenter
Instrument a service (or a chain of services) with OpenTelemetry so a single request can be followed end-to-end — context propagated across every hop including async/queue boundaries, spans at the boundaries that matter, deliberate trace-wide sampling, and trace_id stamped on log lines. Use when latency or failures span multiple services, when you have logs but can't reconstruct a request's full path, or when adopting OpenTelemetry.
SLO Definer
Turn a vague reliability goal into concrete SLIs, SLOs, an error budget, and burn-rate alerts — service-level indicators measured at the user-facing boundary, targets over a rolling window, and a written policy for what happens when the budget runs out. Use when a service has no defined reliability target, when on-call is noisy and alert-fatigued, or before you commit to an SLA you can't measure.
Structured Logging Designer
Design a structured (JSON) logging strategy with a stable field schema, correlation-ID propagation, and a disciplined level policy — then migrate ad-hoc string logs toward it. Use when logs are unsearchable plain text, when debugging a request across services means grepping multiple log streams by hand, or when standing up logging for a new service.