aws-observability-and-cost

aws-observability-and-cost is a skill for Claude Code from jsgerman-oss/blackrim-nimbus-skills. It costs 61 tokens per session (1,501 once invoked), scanned A, original, MIT.

An AWS guide for setting up and reviewing system monitoring and cloud spending. Monitoring means collecting logs, measurements, traces, and alerts about how services behave.

In plain words
What is it for?
Use it to configure CloudWatch, X-Ray, OpenTelemetry, alarms, dashboards, cost budgets, Compute Optimizer, Savings Plans, and related AWS services.
Why use it?
It helps teams detect errors and slowdowns, understand their causes, and identify ways to reduce AWS bills.

Skill for Claude Code

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

Part of the cloud-aws plugin — 6 skills, 1 command, 2 agents shipped together

Good fit Use it to configure CloudWatch, X-Ray, OpenTelemetry, alarms, dashboards, cost budgets, Compute Optimizer, Savings Plans, and related AWS services.

Compare 6 skills from other repositories ↓
Install with agentmods
npx agentmods add skills/jsgerman-oss/blackrim-nimbus-skills/aws-observability-and-cost
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 jsgerman-oss/blackrim-nimbus-skills --skill aws-observability-and-cost
Clone the repo
git clone --depth 1 https://github.com/jsgerman-oss/blackrim-nimbus-skills

Made for: Claude Code.

Or install cloud-aws, the plugin that ships this one along with the rest of its 6 skills, 1 command, 2 agents.

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 aws-observability-and-cost

README.md
[![agentmods](https://agentmods.dev/badge/skills/jsgerman-oss/blackrim-nimbus-skills/aws-observability-and-cost/github.svg)](https://agentmods.dev/skills/jsgerman-oss/blackrim-nimbus-skills/aws-observability-and-cost)
Your own site
<a href="https://agentmods.dev/skills/jsgerman-oss/blackrim-nimbus-skills/aws-observability-and-cost"><img src="https://agentmods.dev/badge/skills/jsgerman-oss/blackrim-nimbus-skills/aws-observability-and-cost/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 aws-observability-and-cost

Your own site · 80×15
<a href="https://agentmods.dev/skills/jsgerman-oss/blackrim-nimbus-skills/aws-observability-and-cost"><img src="https://agentmods.dev/badge/skills/jsgerman-oss/blackrim-nimbus-skills/aws-observability-and-cost.svg" alt="Reviewed on agentmods" width="80" height="20"></a>
Per session 61 Skills are progressive disclosure: only the name and description are preloaded; the body loads when the skill is used.
When invoked 1,501 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 $0.00061 $0.01501
Opus 5 $0.00030 $0.00750
Sonnet 5 $0.00012 $0.00300
Haiku 4.5 $0.00006 $0.00150

Measured 12d ago against content hash fcda7e4bafa6, method: parsed. Prices are Anthropic first-party input rates as of 2026-09-12, from the pricing page.

Security

Grade A, and why

aws-observability-and-cost 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.

cloud-aws/skills/aws-observability-and-cost/SKILL.md · 128 lines

How it starts

The opening of the file, as written. The whole thing — 128 lines — stays where its author put it; the contents beside it link to each section on GitHub.

AWS Observability and Cost

When to use

  • Setting up logs / metrics / traces for a new service.
  • Building an SLO dashboard or wiring an alarm to oncall.
  • Diagnosing a latency / error / cost regression.
  • Negotiating a Savings Plan or Reserved Instance commitment.
  • Sizing a quarterly cloud cost review.

Observability pillars

Pillar Service
Metrics CloudWatch Metrics + Container Insights + Lambda Insights
Logs CloudWatch Logs (with Logs Insights), or OpenSearch / S3 + Athena for long retention
Traces X-Ray (AWS-native) or OpenTelemetry → AWS Distro for OpenTelemetry (ADOT)
Synthetics CloudWatch Synthetics (canaries)
Real User Monitoring CloudWatch RUM
Service map X-Ray Service Map / CloudWatch ServiceLens

Defaults — every service

  • Structured JSON logs with a stable request-id field.
  • Embedded Metric Format (EMF) for app-level metrics — emit from logs, cheaper than PutMetricData.
  • Tracing on (X-Ray or OTEL), with the request-id propagated as a trace baggage / annotation.
  • At least one alarm per service tied to user pain (error rate, p99 latency, queue age, dead-letter count). Never alarm on "CPU > 80%" alone.
  • Log retention: 30 d for app logs in CloudWatch; ship to S3 + Athena for longer if regulated. Default infinite retention is an unbounded bill.

Alarms — write them like contracts

Good alarm spec:

  • Signal: which metric, at which percentile, over which window.
  • Threshold: the number that means "human attention needed".
  • Action: which SNS topic / EventBridge rule / PagerDuty integration.
  • Runbook: linked in the alarm description — first thing the responder reads.

Bad alarms: floating thresholds, "CPU > 80%", anything that fires more than once a week without action.

For composite signals, use CloudWatch composite alarms (AND/OR over child alarms) to suppress noise.

Dashboards

  • One per service, one per environment.
  • Top row: SLI metrics (availability, latency, error rate). Below: dependencies (upstream latency, downstream error rate). Below that: capacity (memory, queue depth, db connections).
  • Variables (regions, env) for dashboards reused across deployments.
  • Generated from IaC so they survive account moves.

Read the full file on GitHub · 128 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 · 128 lines · 61 tokens per session scan A fcda7e4bafa6

Subscribe to this mod's changes

aws-observability-and-cost is a skill published in the GitHub repository jsgerman-oss/blackrim-nimbus-skills (8 stars, last pushed 26d ago), licensed MIT. It adds 61 tokens to every session and 1,501 once invoked, about $0.0003 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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