Observability Skills
Explore 7 curated observability skills for building with AI coding agents — what each one does, when to use it, and how to add it to your workflow.
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.
Background Job Reliability Auditor
Audit scheduled jobs, queue consumers, workers, and asynchronous workflows for delivery assumptions, idempotency, retries, poison messages, concurrency, timeouts, checkpoints, shutdown, and observability. Use when a job duplicates work, silently stops, falls behind, fails only at scale, or needs review before production.
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.
Incident Postmortem Writer
Turn incident notes, alerts, chat logs, deploy history, and traces into a blameless, evidence-backed postmortem with impact, timeline, contributing conditions, detection and response gaps, and owned corrective actions. Use after a production incident, failed deployment, security event, or near miss when the team needs a durable learning document rather than a root-cause guess.
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.