330-observability

330-observability is a cursor rule for coding agents from d-padmanabhan/agent-engineering-handbook. It costs 0 tokens per session (1,055 once invoked), scanned A, original, MIT.

A set of rules for how software should record logs, measurements, traces, alerts, and other operational signals. Observability means collecting information that helps teams understand whether a system is working and why it fails.

In plain words
What is it for?
Use it when designing production logging, metrics, tracing, alerting, telemetry security, and reliability checks for data pipelines.
Why use it?
It prevents inconsistent or unsafe telemetry, such as logs that machines cannot parse or that expose passwords and personal data. It also requires signals to have clear ownership, meaning, and handling rules.

Cursor rule

Install

Getting it into your agent

One page per mod, every tool's command on it. A separate URL per tool would split the same page into five that compete with each other.

agentmods
npx agentmods add rules/d-padmanabhan/agent-engineering-handbook/330-observability
Clone the repo
git clone --depth 1 https://github.com/d-padmanabhan/agent-engineering-handbook

Wrote this? Show the measurements

A badge with what this costs and how it scanned, read live from this page, so it follows the numbers instead of freezing them. Markdown for a README, HTML for a documentation site or a project page.

agentmods badge for 330-observability

README.md
[![agentmods](https://agentmods.dev/badge/rules/d-padmanabhan/agent-engineering-handbook/330-observability.svg)](https://agentmods.dev/rules/d-padmanabhan/agent-engineering-handbook/330-observability)
Your own site
<a href="https://agentmods.dev/rules/d-padmanabhan/agent-engineering-handbook/330-observability"><img src="https://agentmods.dev/badge/rules/d-padmanabhan/agent-engineering-handbook/330-observability.svg" alt="Measured on agentmods" height="20"></a>
Per session 0 Nothing until a file matches its globs; then the whole rule loads.
When invoked 1,055 The whole file, excluding the scripts and references it only reads on demand.
Security scan A 0 findings. Scan, not verified.
Origin original No closer match found in the catalogue.
Token cost

What it costs to keep this loaded

Counted locally with the o200k_base tokenizer, which is exact for GPT models; Claude uses its own tokenizer and its counts differ. Treat this as one consistent yardstick across the catalogue rather than a bill. Prices are per million input tokens.

ModelPer sessionOnce invoked
Fable 5 $0.00000 $0.01055
Opus 5 $0.00000 $0.00528
Sonnet 5 $0.00000 $0.00211
Haiku 4.5 $0.00000 $0.00105

Measured 5d ago against content hash a9b531a5195e, method: parsed. Prices are Anthropic first-party input rates as of 2026-08-30, from the pricing page.

Security

Grade A, and why

330-observability scanned grade A with 0 findings against 26 rules in 11 categories — prompt injection, anti-refusal, data exfiltration, privilege escalation, supply chain, agent snooping, system-prompt leakage, SSRF and excessive agency — measured 5d ago.

A static scan of the body, not an audit. Every finding is printed with the line that produced it so you can judge whether it matters here. A mod is markdown that instructs an agent; that is exactly why what it instructs is worth reading.

Nothing flagged

None of the 26 patterns this scan looks for appear in this file: no shell pipes, no recursive deletes, no credential paths, no hidden text, no instruction-override or anti-refusal phrasing, no agent-config snooping. That is not a guarantee, it is the absence of the things that are checkable.

rules/330-observability.mdc · 117 lines

How it starts

The opening of the file, as written. The whole thing — 117 lines — stays where its author put it; the contents beside it link to each section on GitHub.

Observability Engineering Gates

This rule owns mandatory policy only. Use the observability skill (${HANDBOOK_ROOT}/skills/observability/SKILL.md) for signal selection, schemas, SLOs, dashboards, OpenTelemetry, collector design, and verification.

Signal Design

  • Start from critical user journeys, operational questions, SLOs, and failure modes. Do not add logs, metrics, or spans solely to satisfy a checklist.
  • Define ownership, schema, units, cardinality, sensitivity, retention, cost, and missing-data behavior for each production signal.
  • Correlate signals with valid propagated trace and operation context. Never treat a trace, request, or correlation identifier as authorization evidence.

Structured Logging

  • Emit structured events through an encoder. For ordinary containers, write one JSON object per physical line to stdout or stderr and let the platform collect and rotate logs.
  • Use stable event names and typed fields. Do not make automation parse human-readable messages.
  • Never log credentials, tokens, authorization headers, cookies, private keys, secret values, raw request or response bodies, or unrestricted exception context.
  • Minimize personal and tenant data. Apply explicit classification, purpose, access, retention, and deletion controls when such data is necessary.
  • Bound event size, collections, stack traces, and caller-controlled fields. Encode newlines and control characters so values cannot forge log records.

Metrics, SLOs, and Alerts

  • Use bounded metric labels. Never use user, account, tenant, session, request, trace, email, IP address, raw URL, query, exception, timestamp, or UUID values as labels without a reviewed finite-domain guarantee.
  • Define metric type, unit, monotonicity, label values, and worst-case series count. Monitor cardinality and ingestion cost.
  • Define SLI population, good events, denominator, exclusions, window, missing-data behavior, and data source before setting an SLO.
  • Page only for urgent, actionable user impact or imminent error-budget exhaustion. Every alert requires an owner, runbook, routing, recovery condition, and test.
  • Prefer SLO burn-rate alerts for user-facing reliability. Use resource and dependency alerts for diagnosis or proven capacity risk.

Read the full file on GitHub · 117 lines

Changes

What this file has done since we first saw it

Hashed on every crawl. A supply-chain change to an agent config is a question of when, not whether, so the history is kept rather than the latest state alone.

  1. 5d ago First seen · 117 lines · 0 tokens per session scan A a9b531a5195e

Subscribe to this mod's changes

330-observability is a cursor rule published in the GitHub repository d-padmanabhan/agent-engineering-handbook (16 stars, last pushed 5d ago), licensed MIT. It costs nothing until one of its globs matches a file; then it loads 1,055 tokens. A static security scan graded it A with 0 findings. No closer match exists in the catalogue, so it is treated as the original; first seen 2026-08-30.