synthetic-monitoring

synthetic-monitoring is a skill for Claude Code, Codex from petrkindlmann/qa-skills. It costs 143 tokens per session (5,242 once invoked), scanned A, original, MIT.

A set of practices for scheduled checks that imitate important user actions, such as logging in, searching, or calling an API. These checks run after release to detect outages and verify service-level agreements (SLAs), which are promised availability or response targets.

In plain words
What is it for?
Use it to choose monitoring platforms, design probes for critical user journeys, connect alerts, monitor from multiple regions, and calculate downtime budgets.
Why use it?
It helps find failures that users may not report, reduce missed or excessive alerts, and decide which problems should wake the on-call engineer.

Skill for Claude CodeCodex

Written for no agent in particular: nothing here depends on one. Also seen: mentions Claude Code.

Good fit Use it to choose monitoring platforms, design probes for critical user journeys, connect alerts, monitor from multiple regions, and calculate downtime budgets.

Compare 6 skills from other repositories ↓
Install with agentmods
npx agentmods add skills/petrkindlmann/qa-skills/synthetic-monitoring
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 petrkindlmann/qa-skills --skill synthetic-monitoring
Clone the repo
git clone --depth 1 https://github.com/petrkindlmann/qa-skills

Made for: Claude Code, Codex.

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 synthetic-monitoring

README.md
[![agentmods](https://agentmods.dev/badge/skills/petrkindlmann/qa-skills/synthetic-monitoring/github.svg)](https://agentmods.dev/skills/petrkindlmann/qa-skills/synthetic-monitoring)
Your own site
<a href="https://agentmods.dev/skills/petrkindlmann/qa-skills/synthetic-monitoring"><img src="https://agentmods.dev/badge/skills/petrkindlmann/qa-skills/synthetic-monitoring/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 synthetic-monitoring

Your own site · 80×15
<a href="https://agentmods.dev/skills/petrkindlmann/qa-skills/synthetic-monitoring"><img src="https://agentmods.dev/badge/skills/petrkindlmann/qa-skills/synthetic-monitoring.svg" alt="Reviewed on agentmods" width="80" height="20"></a>
Per session 143 Skills are progressive disclosure: only the name and description are preloaded; the body loads when the skill is used.
When invoked 5,242 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. Third-party audits
  • Socket pass 11 May 2026
  • Snyk warn 11 May 2026
  • NVIDIA SkillSpector warn 7 Sept 2026
SkillSpector: 1 finding, up to medium

These are SkillSpector’s own severities. On a checked sample its high-severity flags on skills were ~96% false positives — a documented command, a public API, a “never do X” rule — so we show them as a caution to read, not a verdict. Why →

  • medium MCP Rug Pull · line 318
    npx commands without a version suffix (e.g. @1.0.0) create a rug-pull risk if the upstream server is compromised and publishes a malicious update.
    Fix: Pin the version: npx @scope/[email protected]
How audits are shown
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 $0.00143 $0.05242
Opus 5 $0.00072 $0.02621
Sonnet 5 $0.00029 $0.01048
Haiku 4.5 $0.00014 $0.00524

Measured 12d ago against content hash 7598cb011f7b, method: parsed. Prices are Anthropic first-party input rates as of 2026-09-12, from the pricing page.

Security

Grade A, and why

synthetic-monitoring 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.

skills/synthetic-monitoring/SKILL.md · 348 lines

How it starts

The opening of the file, as written. The whole thing — 348 lines — stays where its author put it; the contents beside it link to each section on GitHub.

Quick Route

Situation Go to
Picking a platform (Checkly, Datadog, Grafana, CloudWatch…) Platform Options
Writing a probe (login, API health, search) Probe Design → references/probe-implementations.md
Probe runs but users still report outages Failure Modes
Alerts too noisy or missing real outages Alerting Integration
Calculating downtime budget for an SLA SLA Validation
Probe failed at 3 AM and on-call is lost runbook template in references/platforms-and-ci.md

Discovery Questions

Check .agents/qa-project-context.md first. If it exists, use it as context and skip questions already answered there. Each answer changes the probe set, the alerting config, or the SLA math.

Critical flows (decides which probes you write):

  • What are the 5-10 most important user journeys (login, search, checkout, signup, core workflow)? These become your probe list.
  • Which flows, if broken, cause immediate revenue loss or churn? These get the shortest frequency and page on-call.
  • Are there flows that break silently (data sync, background jobs, webhooks)? Silent failures need probes most — no user reports them.
  • Do you have documented SLAs/SLOs for availability and response time? They set the downtime budget and the alert thresholds.

Current monitoring (decides where the gaps are):

  • What exists today (uptime checks, APM, error tracking, dashboards)? Avoid duplicating; find the gap.
  • Are there gaps between what monitoring covers and what users experience? That gap is where probes earn their keep.
  • How do you learn about production issues today (alerts, user reports, social media)? If it's user reports, detection time is your first metric to fix.
  • What was the last outage, and how long before it was detected? Sets the detection-time target probes must beat.

Read the full file on GitHub · 348 lines

Files

What ships with it

2 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. 12d ago First seen · 348 lines · 143 tokens per session scan A 7598cb011f7b

Subscribe to this mod's changes

synthetic-monitoring is a skill published in the GitHub repository petrkindlmann/qa-skills (120 stars, last pushed 3mo ago), licensed MIT. It adds 143 tokens to every session and 5,242 once invoked, about $0.0007 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.