msk-operations

A guide for operating Amazon MSK Provisioned, AWS's managed service for Apache Kafka, including Standard and Express broker types. Kafka is software used to move streams of events between services.

In plain words
What is it for?
Use it to assess clusters, investigate high CPU, latency, consumer lag, low storage, broker restarts, and replication problems; set up CloudWatch monitoring; plan maintenance; and tune Kafka clients.
Why use it?
It helps diagnose cluster health and performance issues before they cause lost capacity, delayed messages, or service interruptions.

Skill for Claude CodeCodex

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 skills/aws/tools-for-devops-agent/msk-operations
Any agent
npx skills add aws/tools-for-devops-agent --skill msk-operations
Clone the repo
git clone --depth 1 https://github.com/aws/tools-for-devops-agent

Made for: Claude Code, Codex.

Per session 226 Skills are progressive disclosure: only the name and description are preloaded; the body loads when the skill is used.
When invoked 6,702 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 $0.00226 $0.06702
Opus 5 $0.00113 $0.03351
Sonnet 5 $0.00045 $0.01340
Haiku 4.5 $0.00023 $0.00670

Measured 2d ago against content hash 7f235673132b, method: parsed. Prices are Anthropic first-party input rates as of 2026-08-30, from the pricing page.

Security

Grade A, and why

msk-operations 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 2d 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/msk-operations/SKILL.md · 591 lines

How it starts

The opening of the file, as written. The whole thing — 591 lines — stays where its author put it; the contents beside it link to each section on GitHub.

Amazon MSK Operations

Operate, troubleshoot, and assess Amazon MSK (Managed Streaming for Apache Kafka) Provisioned clusters — both Standard and Express broker types. This skill covers day-to-day operations (health assessments, monitoring setup) and ad-hoc incident response (performance degradation, consumer lag, storage full, unexpected broker reboots).

When to Use

Activate this skill when the user asks to:

  • Review, audit, or assess an MSK cluster for best practices, health, or operational readiness.
  • Troubleshoot an MSK cluster problem: high CPU, high produce/fetch latency, consumer lag, broker storage running out, TrafficShaping events, under-replicated partitions, or an unexpected broker restart.
  • Set up MSK monitoring: choose a monitoring level, create recommended CloudWatch alarms and dashboards, understand the metrics available in the AWS/Kafka namespace.
  • Plan an MSK maintenance event: rolling restart, Kafka version upgrade, security patching, broker instance type change.
  • Advise on Kafka client (producer / consumer) configuration when the client is connecting to an MSK cluster.

Do not activate this skill for MSK Connect, MSK Serverless, or MSK Replicator — those are separate services with their own operational surfaces.

Broker Type Determination

Determine the broker type first — many checks differ between Standard and Express.

aws kafka describe-cluster-v2 --cluster-arn <cluster-arn>

Check ClusterInfo.Provisioned.BrokerNodeGroupInfo.InstanceType:

  • Starts with kafka. (e.g. kafka.m5.large, kafka.m7g.xlarge) → Standard broker.
  • Starts with express. (e.g. express.m7g.large) → Express broker.

Key Standard vs Express differences

Standard brokers use customer-managed EBS volumes for storage. You choose instance types (kafka.m5.*, kafka.m7g.*), provision EBS, and manage storage scaling. Standard brokers have scheduled maintenance windows.

Express brokers provide fully managed, pay-as-you-go storage with no EBS provisioning. Instance types are prefixed with express.m7g.*. Express brokers offer up to 3× more throughput per broker than Standard, and have no maintenance windows. Express enforces a fixed replication factor of 3 and min.insync.replicas=2 — you cannot create topics with RF=1.

Read the full file on GitHub · 591 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. 2d ago First seen · 591 lines · 226 tokens per session scan A 7f235673132b

Subscribe to this mod's changes

msk-operations is a skill published in the GitHub repository aws/tools-for-devops-agent (40 stars, last pushed 5d ago), licensed Apache-2.0. It adds 226 tokens to every session and 6,702 once invoked, about $0.0011 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 2026-08-30.

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