observability

A guide to production observability: collecting logs, metrics, and traces so developers can understand how a running service behaves. It also covers service targets and alerts.

In plain words
What is it for?
Use it to add monitoring to services, design dashboards, choose monitoring tools, define service objectives, write alerts, and investigate incidents.
Why use it?
It helps find the cause of production failures and reduces noisy alerts that people learn to ignore.

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/kouroshez/coding-os/observability
Any agent
npx skills add kouroshez/coding-os --skill observability
Clone the repo
git clone --depth 1 https://github.com/kouroshez/coding-os

Made for: Claude Code, Codex.

Per session 124 Skills are progressive disclosure: only the name and description are preloaded; the body loads when the skill is used.
When invoked 3,309 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 $0.00124 $0.03309
Opus 5 $0.00062 $0.01655
Sonnet 5 $0.00025 $0.00662
Haiku 4.5 $0.00012 $0.00331

Measured 2d ago against content hash 924f96868392, method: parsed. Prices are Anthropic first-party input rates as of 2026-08-30, from the pricing page.

Security

Grade A, and why

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 2d ago.

The scan reads SKILL.md. This mod also ships 1 executable file (scripts/lint_logging.py), listed below but not scanned — reading those needs a real analyzer, not pattern matching.

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.

src/core/skills/observability/SKILL.md · 290 lines

How it starts

The opening of the file, as written. The whole thing — 290 lines — stays where its author put it; the contents beside it link to each section on GitHub.

Observability — Logs, Traces, Metrics, SLOs

A practical playbook for instrumenting production code so an incident at 03:00 takes minutes, not hours. Aligned with OpenTelemetry 1.x (the 2026 industry standard) and the SRE workbook's golden-signal approach.

When to Use This Skill

  • Adding logging / tracing / metrics to a new service.
  • Designing dashboards before launch — observability built in, not bolted on.
  • Choosing between OpenTelemetry, Datadog APM, Honeycomb, Grafana Stack, Sentry.
  • Defining SLO / SLI / error-budget policy for a feature.
  • Writing or reviewing alert rules — a good alert wakes a human at 03:00 for the right reason.
  • Investigating "we have logs but can't find the bug" or "alerts fire constantly so nobody reads them."

Skip when: writing a one-off script or a dev-only tool with no production lifetime.

The Three Pillars + One

Industry consensus (2020s onward) is three pillars + traces-as-glue:

Pillar Question it answers Tools
Metrics "How is the system doing right now?" — counters, gauges, histograms Prometheus, Datadog Metrics, CloudWatch Metrics
Logs "What exactly happened for this request?" — structured events Loki, ELK, Datadog Logs, CloudWatch Logs
Traces "How did the work flow across services?" — spans + parent-child links Jaeger, Tempo, Datadog APM, Honeycomb
Profiles (emerging fourth) "Why is the CPU/memory burning?" — continuous profiling Pyroscope, Parca, Datadog Profiler

Always use OpenTelemetry (OTel) as the instrumentation layer. Send to whatever backend you pick. This decouples vendor choice from code — switching from Datadog to Honeycomb becomes a config change, not a rewrite. OTel SDK is stable for traces, metrics, and logs in 2026 across Python, TypeScript, Go, Java.

Golden Signals (Google SRE Book)

Every service has four metrics worth tracking, no matter what it does:

Signal What Why
Latency P50 / P95 / P99 of successful responses Slow → users churn
Traffic Requests per second / events per second Capacity planning, anomaly baseline
Errors Rate of failed requests (5xx for HTTP) Reliability bottom line
Saturation "How full" — CPU%, mem%, queue depth, connection pool used Predicts incidents before they fire

Read the full file on GitHub · 290 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. 2d ago First seen · 290 lines · 124 tokens per session scan A 924f96868392

Subscribe to this mod's changes

observability is a skill published in the GitHub repository kouroshez/coding-os (6 stars, last pushed 2d ago), licensed Apache-2.0. It adds 124 tokens to every session and 3,309 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 2026-08-31.

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