production-investigation

production-investigation is a skill for Claude Code from honeycombio/agent-skill. It costs 112 tokens per session (1,719 once invoked), scanned A, original, MIT.

A structured workflow for investigating production problems in Honeycomb, a tool for examining what applications do in production. It covers moving from a broad view of an issue to individual traces and a verified root cause.

In plain words
What is it for?
Use it to investigate latency spikes, error increases, alert violations, and other production issues by narrowing the problem and checking the suspected cause.
Why use it?
It gives investigations a repeatable sequence and helps connect alerts, service data, queries, and trace details instead of searching through them separately.

Skill for Claude Code

Written for Claude Code: ${CLAUDE_PLUGIN_ROOT} variable.

Runs only inside its plugin — its command needs a path that Claude Code sets for a plugin’s own hooks and for nothing else. Install the plugin, not this.

Part of the honeycomb plugin — 11 skills, 1 command, 2 agents, 2 hooks shipped together

Good fit Use it to investigate latency spikes, error increases, alert violations, and other production issues by narrowing the problem and checking the suspected cause.

Compare 6 skills from other repositories ↓
Install

Getting it into your agent

This one installs as part of its plugin. Adding the marketplace and installing the plugin brings it with everything else the plugin ships.

Claude Code
/plugin marketplace add honeycombio/agent-skill
Claude Code
/plugin install honeycomb

Made for: Claude Code.

Or install honeycomb, the plugin that ships this one along with the rest of its 11 skills, 1 command, 2 agents, 2 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 production-investigation

README.md
[![agentmods](https://agentmods.dev/badge/skills/honeycombio/agent-skill/production-investigation/github.svg)](https://agentmods.dev/skills/honeycombio/agent-skill/production-investigation)
Your own site
<a href="https://agentmods.dev/skills/honeycombio/agent-skill/production-investigation"><img src="https://agentmods.dev/badge/skills/honeycombio/agent-skill/production-investigation/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 production-investigation

Your own site · 80×15
<a href="https://agentmods.dev/skills/honeycombio/agent-skill/production-investigation"><img src="https://agentmods.dev/badge/skills/honeycombio/agent-skill/production-investigation.svg" alt="Reviewed on agentmods" width="80" height="20"></a>
Per session 112 Skills are progressive disclosure: only the name and description are preloaded; the body loads when the skill is used.
When invoked 1,719 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 $0.00112 $0.01719
Opus 5 $0.00056 $0.00860
Sonnet 5 $0.00022 $0.00344
Haiku 4.5 $0.00011 $0.00172

Measured 11d ago against content hash 60b3b1c4c5b1, method: parsed. Prices are Anthropic first-party input rates as of 2026-09-10, from the pricing page.

Security

Grade A, and why

production-investigation 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 11d 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.

honeycomb/skills/production-investigation/SKILL.md · 138 lines

How it starts

The opening of the file, as written. The whole thing — 138 lines — stays where its author put it; the contents beside it link to each section on GitHub.

Honeycomb Production Investigation

Structured workflows for debugging production issues. The MCP tools document their own parameters — this skill focuses on the sequence of tool calls and how to interpret results to reach a root cause.

The Core Analysis Loop

This workflow implements the core analysis loop (Define → Visualize → Investigate → Evaluate) from the observability-fundamentals skill. If BubbleUp returns nothing useful, the issue is often an instrumentation gap — add the missing attributes (see the otel-instrumentation skill) and try again.

Investigation Workflow

Step 1: Orient

  1. get_workspace_context → environments and datasets
  2. get_slos → any SLOs in violation? (frames severity)
  3. get_triggers → any alerts firing? (narrows scope)
  4. find_queries → has anyone investigated this before?

Step 2: Characterize the Problem

Run a broad query to see the shape of the issue:

  • Latency spike: P99(duration_ms), HEATMAP(duration_ms) grouped by service or route
  • Error surge: count failed operation spans (error=true) by service/route/category, then separately count exception event rows using event.name=exception and exception.type exists; use sampled trace.trace_id values to drill into representative traces
  • Unknown: COUNT grouped by service.name to find which service has anomalous volume

Also call get_service_map — it shows P95 durations between services and can immediately reveal which dependency is slow.

Exception data has two query surfaces: operation failures belong on spans (error=true, span status, low-cardinality exception.slug/error category); full exception diagnostics may belong on trace-correlated Logs API event rows. Do not assume exception.* exists on the containing span. When investigating exceptions, discover the dataset schema first, query event.name=exception with exception.type exists and trace.trace_id exists, take a sample, then pass its trace.trace_id to get_trace(show_events=true). For legacy span-event exceptions, also check name=exception and meta.signal_type=trace; Logs API events use event.name/body and meta.signal_type=log.

Read the full file on GitHub · 138 lines

Files

What ships with it

3 files beside SKILL.md in the same directory: the scripts, references and assets a skill reads on demand. Not counted in the per-session cost; read them before you install if any of them is executable.

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. 11d ago First seen · 138 lines · 112 tokens per session scan A 60b3b1c4c5b1

Subscribe to this mod's changes

production-investigation is a skill published in the GitHub repository honeycombio/agent-skill (22 stars, last pushed 14d ago), licensed MIT. It adds 112 tokens to every session and 1,719 once invoked, about $0.0006 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.

Related

Other skills, from other repositories

debug-optimize-lcp

Guides debugging and optimizing Largest Contentful Paint (LCP) using Chrome DevTools MCP tools. Use this skill whenever the user asks about LCP performance, slow page loads, Core Web Vitals optimization, or wants to understand why their page's main content takes too long to appear. Also use when the user mentions…

ChromeDevTools/chrome-devtools-mcp · 99 tokens

systematic-debugging

Use when debugging a failing test, build error, or runtime issue that isn't immediately obvious. Guides a 4-phase root cause analysis instead of random fix attempts.

open-metadata/OpenMetadata · 37 tokens

diagnose

Trace from a reproduced symptom to the source code that causes it. Pin the specific file and approximate line, rate confidence in the cause and clarity of the fix independently, and always propose a concrete fix.

emdash-cms/emdash · 43 tokens

repro-admin

Reproduce an EmDash admin UI bug. Attach a container, start the demo dev server, drive the admin with agent-browser using the dev-bypass session, and capture the reproduction as screenshots plus a replayable transcript.

emdash-cms/emdash · 48 tokens

log-error-digest

Analyze log files to troubleshoot errors, identify peak error periods, and produce error clustering, frequency statistics, and time distribution reports. Supports JSON, syslog, and Nginx formats with automatic detection. Use when a user uploads a .log file and asks to analyze errors, find patterns, debug issues, or…

zebbern/claude-code-guide · 71 tokens

byted-util-volcengine-detect-retry

An orchestration workflow for Volcengine Cloud Detect, a service that checks websites or network endpoints from test locations.

bytedance/agentkit-samples · 101 tokens