monitoring-capture-service

A guide for using Grafana to monitor PostHog’s Rust capture service, the HTTP endpoint that receives events from software development kits, applies limits, and sends events to Kafka.

In plain words
What is it for?
Use it to investigate capture latency, lost events, Kafka backpressure, Redis issues, rate limiting, or Envoy proxy health.
Why use it?
It provides a way to investigate capture problems while accounting for separate US and EU production environments and service-specific metrics.

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/posthog/posthog-foss/monitoring-capture-service
Any agent
npx skills add PostHog/posthog-foss --skill monitoring-capture-service
Clone the repo
git clone --depth 1 https://github.com/PostHog/posthog-foss

Made for: Claude Code, Codex.

Per session 66 Skills are progressive disclosure: only the name and description are preloaded; the body loads when the skill is used.
When invoked 4,546 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 $0.00066 $0.04546
Opus 5 $0.00033 $0.02273
Sonnet 5 $0.00013 $0.00909
Haiku 4.5 $0.00007 $0.00455

Measured today against content hash e6dd3267a4d6, method: parsed. Prices are Anthropic first-party input rates as of 2026-08-30, from the pricing page.

Security

Grade A, and why

monitoring-capture-service 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 today.

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.

.agents/skills/monitoring-capture-service/SKILL.md · 305 lines

How it starts

The opening of the file, as written. The whole thing — 305 lines — stays where its author put it; the contents beside it link to each section on GitHub.

Monitoring the capture service with Grafana MCP

The capture service (rust/capture/) is PostHog's Rust HTTP ingestion endpoint. It receives events from SDKs, applies quota/rate limits, and produces to Kafka. Five deployments run the same binary with different CAPTURE_MODE configs, each in its own K8s namespace.

This skill teaches how to discover live metrics using the Grafana MCP tools rather than memorizing metric names that change as the code evolves.

Environment context

The Grafana MCP is connected to a single Grafana instance scoped to one environment. If the user hasn't specified, ask which environment they want to investigate:

  • prod-us — US production (us-east-1)
  • prod-eu — EU production (eu-central-1)

Most capture app metrics (e.g. capture_*, http_requests_*, envoy_cluster_*) are environment-specific by virtue of which Grafana you're connected to — they don't carry an environment label. MSK and CloudWatch metrics do carry environment labels but are still scoped to the connected Grafana's AWS account.

Cross-environment comparison requires switching Grafana instances (not possible in one session).

Observability landscape

Capture spans seven telemetry domains. Each has a Grafana datasource and a discovery entry point.

Domain Datasource UID Discovery tool Scope filter
App metrics (VictoriaMetrics) victoriametrics list_prometheus_metric_names regex: "capture_.*"
App metrics (realtime) victoriametrics-realtime same same (lower retention, higher resolution)
Logs P44D702D3E93867EC (Loki-logs) list_loki_label_names app=~"capture.*"
Profiling pyroscope list_pyroscope_profile_types service_name="capture-analytics/capture-analytics"
Dashboards n/a search_dashboards query "capture" or "ingestion"
CloudWatch (ElastiCache, MSK) P034F075C744B399F query_prometheus environment="prod-us"
CloudWatch Root (prod-us only) PAAE47F430CFD1449 same root account AWS metrics (does NOT exist in prod-eu)

Read the full file on GitHub · 305 lines

Files

What ships with it

1 file 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. today Changed · +1 lines e6dd3267a4d6
  2. yesterday First seen · 304 lines · 66 tokens per session scan A d6fb2ba5fc70

Subscribe to this mod's changes

monitoring-capture-service is a skill published in the GitHub repository PostHog/posthog-foss (713 stars, last pushed today), licensed MIT. It adds 66 tokens to every session and 4,546 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 2026-08-30.

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