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.
npx skills add mickeyyaya/refactoring-skills --skill distributed-tracing-patternsgit clone --depth 1 https://github.com/mickeyyaya/refactoring-skillsWrote 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.
[](https://agentmods.dev/skills/mickeyyaya/refactoring-skills/distributed-tracing-patterns)<a href="https://agentmods.dev/skills/mickeyyaya/refactoring-skills/distributed-tracing-patterns"><img src="https://agentmods.dev/badge/skills/mickeyyaya/refactoring-skills/distributed-tracing-patterns.svg" alt="Measured on agentmods" height="20"></a>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.
| Model | Per session | Once invoked |
|---|---|---|
| Fable 5.1 | $0.00088 | $0.04288 |
| Opus 5 | $0.00044 | $0.02144 |
| Sonnet 5 | $0.00018 | $0.00858 |
| Haiku 4.5 | $0.00009 | $0.00429 |
Grade A, and why
distributed-tracing-patterns 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 8d 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.
How it starts
The opening of the file, as written. The whole thing — 470 lines — stays where its author put it; the contents beside it link to each section on GitHub.
Distributed Tracing Patterns
Overview
Distributed tracing records the journey of a request across services as a tree of spans. Without proper instrumentation, diagnosing latency in a microservices system requires guesswork. Done poorly — missing context propagation, over-instrumentation, or span explosion — tracing creates noise and cost without insight.
When to use: Instrumenting a new service, reviewing tracing code, debugging latency across service boundaries, linking traces to metrics, or designing a sampling strategy for high-throughput systems.
Prerequisite skills: observability-patterns, microservices-resilience-patterns, performance-anti-patterns.
Quick Reference
| Topic | Core Idea | Primary Red Flag |
|---|---|---|
| Auto-instrumentation | Framework hooks inject spans with zero code change | Forgetting to add SDK; auto-spans are too coarse |
| Manual instrumentation | Code-level spans for business operations | Spans that duplicate auto-instrumented work |
| Span naming | <verb> <noun> using a stable taxonomy |
Dynamic IDs in span names cause cardinality explosion |
| Span attributes | Semantic conventions for keys; bounded value sets | Free-text attribute values create unbounded cardinality |
| Span status | OK / ERROR / UNSET with description only on ERROR | Setting ERROR on expected 404s pollutes error rates |
| Context propagation | W3C TraceContext (traceparent) or B3 headers |
Fire-and-forget calls that drop context |
| Head sampling | Decision made at trace root, propagated downstream | Sampling before context is set loses correlated spans |
| Tail sampling | Decision made after all spans collected | Requires stateful collector; complex to operate |
| Probabilistic sampling | Fixed rate (e.g., 1%) applied uniformly | Low-rate sampling misses rare slow paths |
| Rate-limiting sampling | Fixed span count per second | Spiky traffic bursts still get sampled proportionally |
| Exemplars | Attach trace ID to a metric data point | Metrics and traces in separate systems with no link |
| Over-instrumentation | More spans than needed obscures signal | Every line of code wrapped in a span |
| Span explosion | Dynamic span names or attributes create millions of series | span.name = "GET /users/" + userId |
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.
- 8d ago First seen · 470 lines · 88 tokens per session scan A 70bb51776f0b
distributed-tracing-patterns is a skill published in the GitHub repository mickeyyaya/refactoring-skills (6 stars, last pushed 5mo ago), licensed MIT. It adds 88 tokens to every session and 4,288 once invoked, about $0.0004 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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