api-error-observability

Guidance for designing API errors and making failures visible in logs and monitoring. It covers HTTP status codes, stable error formats, request and trace IDs, metrics, alerts, and distributed tracing, which follows a request across services.

In plain words
What is it for?
Use it when designing error responses, logging failed requests, deciding whether clients should retry, or setting up service monitoring and alerts.
Why use it?
It prevents errors from becoming vague messages that users cannot act on and operators cannot investigate.

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/cass-2003/local-workflow-skill/api-error-observability
Any agent
npx skills add cass-2003/local-workflow-skill --skill api-error-observability
Clone the repo
git clone --depth 1 https://github.com/cass-2003/local-workflow-skill

Made for: Claude Code, Codex.

Per session 94 Skills are progressive disclosure: only the name and description are preloaded; the body loads when the skill is used.
When invoked 786 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 $0.00094 $0.00786
Opus 5 $0.00047 $0.00393
Sonnet 5 $0.00019 $0.00157
Haiku 4.5 $0.00009 $0.00079

Measured 3d ago against content hash fa6425f08358, method: parsed. Prices are Anthropic first-party input rates as of 2026-08-30, from the pricing page.

Security

Grade A, and why

api-error-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 3d 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/backend-api/ours/api-error-observability/SKILL.md · 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.

API Error And Observability

Core Goal

Make failures understandable to users, clients, operators, and future agents. Every important error should answer: what happened, who is affected, can it be retried, and where is the evidence?

Error Contract

Use a stable error shape:

{
  "type": "https://docs.example.com/errors/quota-exceeded",
  "code": "quota_exceeded",
  "message": "Quota exceeded for this workspace.",
  "request_id": "req_123",
  "retryable": false,
  "details": {
    "limit": 1000,
    "window": "month"
  }
}

Expose safe messages to clients. Put sensitive internals only in logs.

HTTP Status Guidance

Status Use For
400 invalid request shape
401 not authenticated
403 authenticated but not allowed
404 not found or intentionally hidden
409 conflict, version mismatch, duplicate invariant
422 semantic validation failure
429 rate limited
500 unhandled server error
503 temporary service unavailable

Do not return 200 with an error object for normal APIs.

Logging Rules

  • Log structured fields, not only prose.
  • Include request id, trace id, user id if safe, tenant id if safe, route, method, status, duration, and error code.
  • Redact secrets and PII.
  • Log at boundaries: request start/end, external calls, queue jobs, auth failures, and critical domain transitions.
  • Avoid logging full request bodies by default.

Trace And Metrics

Minimum metrics:

  • request count by route/status
  • latency histogram by route
  • error count by code
  • dependency latency and failure rate
  • queue lag if API enqueues work

Minimum tracing:

  • inbound request span
  • database query spans or summarized DB timing
  • external HTTP calls
  • queue publish/consume spans
  • cache calls when they affect latency

SLO And Alerting

Alert on symptoms before causes:

  • p95/p99 latency above SLO
  • error rate above threshold
  • dependency failure spike
  • queue lag above threshold
  • no traffic when traffic is expected

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. 3d ago First seen · 117 lines · 94 tokens per session scan A fa6425f08358

Subscribe to this mod's changes

api-error-observability is a skill published in the GitHub repository cass-2003/local-workflow-skill (12 stars, last pushed 1mo ago), licensed MIT. It adds 94 tokens to every session and 786 once invoked, about $0.0005 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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