observability-checklist

observability-checklist is a skill for Claude Code from atuljha23/holocron. It costs 49 tokens per session (1,067 once invoked), scanned A, original, MIT.

A guide for investigating software bugs by reproducing them, forming several possible explanations, testing those explanations, finding the cause, fixing it, and adding protection against its return.

In plain words
What is it for?
Use it when a bug is not yet understood, especially when you need to narrow down which input, environment, code change, or runtime condition triggers it.
Why use it?
It replaces guesswork and indiscriminate logging with a repeatable process for finding the actual cause of a failure.

Skill for Claude Code

Written for Claude Code: shipped in a Claude Code plugin.

Part of the holocron plugin — 11 skills, 24 commands, 14 agents, 6 hooks shipped together

Good fit Use it when a bug is not yet understood, especially when you need to narrow down which input, environment, code change, or runtime condition triggers it.

Compare 6 skills from other repositories ↓
Install with agentmods
npx agentmods add skills/atuljha23/holocron/observability-checklist
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.

Any agent
npx skills add atuljha23/holocron --skill observability-checklist
Clone the repo
git clone --depth 1 https://github.com/atuljha23/holocron

Made for: Claude Code.

Or install holocron, the plugin that ships this one along with the rest of its 11 skills, 24 commands, 14 agents, 6 hooks.

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 observability-checklist

README.md
[![agentmods](https://agentmods.dev/badge/skills/atuljha23/holocron/observability-checklist/github.svg)](https://agentmods.dev/skills/atuljha23/holocron/observability-checklist)
Your own site
<a href="https://agentmods.dev/skills/atuljha23/holocron/observability-checklist"><img src="https://agentmods.dev/badge/skills/atuljha23/holocron/observability-checklist/github.svg" alt="Measured on agentmods" height="20"></a>

Or the 80×15 button, for a site that already has a row of RSS and ATOM ones. Only the verdict fits; the numbers stay here.

agentmods 80×15 button for observability-checklist

Your own site · 80×15
<a href="https://agentmods.dev/skills/atuljha23/holocron/observability-checklist"><img src="https://agentmods.dev/badge/skills/atuljha23/holocron/observability-checklist.svg" alt="Reviewed on agentmods" width="80" height="20"></a>
Per session 49 Skills are progressive disclosure: only the name and description are preloaded; the body loads when the skill is used.
When invoked 1,067 The whole file, excluding the scripts and references it only reads on demand.
Security scan A 0 findings. A grade says what 26 rules found in the file — not that it is safe.
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 5.1 $0.00049 $0.01067
Opus 5 $0.00024 $0.00534
Sonnet 5 $0.00010 $0.00213
Haiku 4.5 $0.00005 $0.00107

Measured 12d ago against content hash 0a4f8bd940b1, method: parsed. Prices are Anthropic first-party input rates as of 2026-09-12, from the pricing page.

Security

Grade A, and why

observability-checklist 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 12d 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.

skills/observability-checklist/SKILL.md · 114 lines

How it starts

The opening of the file, as written. The whole thing — 114 lines — stays where its author put it; the contents beside it link to each section on GitHub.

Observability checklist

The goal isn't logs — it's answering "what happened" in under five minutes at 2am. Design backward from the question.

Logs

Structured or nothing

  • JSON (or logfmt), not free text.
  • Every log has: ts, level, service, request_id, msg, and relevant fields.
  • Fields are snake_case or camelCase — pick one per service. No mixing.
  • Durations in milliseconds as numbers, not "took 2s" strings.

Levels are a contract

  • error: something failed the user can't recover from. Alert-worthy.
  • warn: something unexpected but handled. Review-worthy.
  • info: the shape of normal traffic. Sampling OK.
  • debug: developer-only. Off in prod.
  • Don't invent new levels.

What to log

  • Request entry (method, path, user, request_id).
  • Outcome (status, duration).
  • Branch decisions that matter (authz check, cache hit/miss, retry).
  • Errors with the full context you need to reproduce.

What NOT to log

  • Secrets, tokens, passwords, PII — scrub before logging.
  • The full request body by default. Specific fields, yes. Everything, no.
  • Stack traces as separate lines — include as a stack field so they stay with the event.

Traces

Span per unit of work

  • HTTP request handler = 1 span.
  • Outbound call = child span.
  • DB query = child span (with db.statement truncated / hashed, not raw if PII risk).
  • Background job step = 1 span.

Mandatory attributes

  • service.name, service.version.
  • For HTTP: http.method, http.route, http.status_code.
  • For DB: db.system, db.operation.
  • For errors: exception.type, exception.message.

Propagation

  • Every outbound request carries trace context headers.
  • Every background job enqueues with trace context.
  • A trace that ends at the HTTP edge and restarts at the worker is useless.

Metrics

RED for services

  • Rate — requests per second, per endpoint.
  • Errors — error rate, per endpoint.
  • Duration — p50/p95/p99, per endpoint.

USE for resources

  • Utilization — % of capacity in use.
  • Saturation — queue depth / wait time.
  • Errors — failed operations.

Read the full file on GitHub · 114 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. 12d ago First seen · 114 lines · 49 tokens per session scan A 0a4f8bd940b1

Subscribe to this mod's changes

observability-checklist is a skill published in the GitHub repository atuljha23/holocron (2 stars, last pushed 4mo ago), licensed MIT. It adds 49 tokens to every session and 1,067 once invoked, about $0.0002 per session on Opus 5. 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 2026-08-31.

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