Operational Excellence

Operational Excellence is a skill for Claude Code from robisson/build-like-amazon-agent-skills. It costs 33 tokens per session (1,899 once invoked), scanned A, original, MIT.

A set of practices for making a running service understandable and manageable. It uses dashboards, alarms, and runbooks—written instructions for responding to problems—to track health and guide on-call engineers.

In plain words
What is it for?
Use it when launching or reviewing a service, preparing for on-call work, investigating slow or failing systems, or improving incident response.
Why use it?
It helps engineers detect, diagnose, and respond to incidents even when they did not write the service. It also exposes gaps after incidents or before launch.

Skill for Claude Code

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

Part of the build-like-amazon plugin — 28 skills, 14 commands shipped together

Good fit Use it when launching or reviewing a service, preparing for on-call work, investigating slow or failing systems, or improving incident response.

Compare 6 skills from other repositories ↓
Install with agentmods
npx agentmods add skills/robisson/build-like-amazon-agent-skills/operational-excellence
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 robisson/build-like-amazon-agent-skills --skill operational-excellence
Clone the repo
git clone --depth 1 https://github.com/robisson/build-like-amazon-agent-skills

Made for: Claude Code.

Or install build-like-amazon, the plugin that ships this one along with the rest of its 28 skills, 14 commands.

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 Operational Excellence

README.md
[![agentmods](https://agentmods.dev/badge/skills/robisson/build-like-amazon-agent-skills/operational-excellence/github.svg)](https://agentmods.dev/skills/robisson/build-like-amazon-agent-skills/operational-excellence)
Your own site
<a href="https://agentmods.dev/skills/robisson/build-like-amazon-agent-skills/operational-excellence"><img src="https://agentmods.dev/badge/skills/robisson/build-like-amazon-agent-skills/operational-excellence/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 Operational Excellence

Your own site · 80×15
<a href="https://agentmods.dev/skills/robisson/build-like-amazon-agent-skills/operational-excellence"><img src="https://agentmods.dev/badge/skills/robisson/build-like-amazon-agent-skills/operational-excellence.svg" alt="Reviewed on agentmods" width="80" height="20"></a>
Per session 33 Skills are progressive disclosure: only the name and description are preloaded; the body loads when the skill is used.
When invoked 1,899 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 $0.00033 $0.01899
Opus 5 $0.00016 $0.00949
Sonnet 5 $0.00007 $0.00380
Haiku 4.5 $0.00003 $0.00190

Measured 10d ago against content hash 80a5cb03bac3, method: parsed. Prices are Anthropic first-party input rates as of 2026-09-10, from the pricing page.

Security

Grade A, and why

Operational Excellence 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 10d 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/operational-excellence/SKILL.md · 165 lines

How it starts

The opening of the file, as written. The whole thing — 165 lines — stays where its author put it; the contents beside it link to each section on GitHub.

Operational Excellence

Overview

Operational excellence means your service is observable, alarmed, and documented such that any on-call engineer can understand its health and respond to problems—even at 3 AM without the original author available. This requires dashboards that show the right metrics at the right granularity, alarms that fire at the right thresholds with the right severity, and runbooks that provide actionable steps for each alarm.

When to Use

  • Building a new service (operational readiness before launch)
  • Reviewing an existing service's operational posture
  • After any incident where detection or response was slower than expected
  • When onboarding a new team member to on-call
  • During operational readiness reviews (ORR)
  • When service metrics indicate degradation trends

Agent Persona

Load agents/ops-bar-raiser.md when evaluating dashboards, alarms, runbooks, and operational burden. Use it to challenge whether the service can be diagnosed, mitigated, and rolled back by someone who did not write the code.

Amazon Context

At Amazon, you build it, you own it, you operate it. There is no separate operations team that runs your service. The team that writes the code carries the pager. This means operational excellence is not an afterthought—it's a core competency of every engineer. A service without proper alarms is a service where customers discover problems before you do. A service without runbooks is a service where every incident requires the original author, creating a single point of failure.

The Process

Dashboards

Every service needs three dashboard levels:

Level 1: Customer Experience Dashboard (primary)

  • Availability: successful requests / total requests (target: 99.9%+ or per-SLA)
  • Latency: p50, p90, p99, p99.9 (separate graphs, not averaged)
  • Error rate: 5xx rate, client error rate (4xx), timeout rate
  • Throughput: requests per second (to detect traffic anomalies)
  • Business metrics: orders/sec, messages delivered/sec, etc.

Read the full file on GitHub · 165 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. 10d ago First seen · 165 lines · 33 tokens per session scan A 80a5cb03bac3

Subscribe to this mod's changes

Operational Excellence is a skill published in the GitHub repository robisson/build-like-amazon-agent-skills (15 stars, last pushed 3mo ago), licensed MIT. It adds 33 tokens to every session and 1,899 once invoked, about $0.0002 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.

Related

Other skills, from other repositories

gke-alert-configuration

Configures alerting policies in Terraform for Google Kubernetes Engine (GKE) clusters, workloads, and services using PromQL and Google Cloud Managed Service for Prometheus. Use when writing, analyzing, validating, or deploying Terraform alerting policies to monitor GKE service latency, traffic, error rates using…

google/skills · 120 tokens

cloud-run-basics

Manages Cloud Run services, jobs, and worker pools. Use when you need to deploy applications responding to HTTP requests (services), run event-triggered or scheduled tasks (jobs), or handle always-on pull-based background processing (worker pools).

google/skills · 53 tokens

google-cloud-filestore-auditing

Audits Google Cloud Filestore instances across projects for disaster recovery readiness (missing or stale backups), security access governance (overly permissive NFS export rules, 0.0.0.0/0 exposure, missing ROOTSQUASH), and reliability compliance (Physical Zone Isolation PZI and Physical Zone Separation PZS). Use…

google/skills · 115 tokens

cloud-monitoring-list-time-series-request

Generates valid Cloud Monitoring ListTimeSeries requests and aggregation specifications from metric descriptors and resource parameters. Use when asked to create, generate, format, or build ListTimeSeries requests, JSON payloads, filter expressions, or aligner/reducer aggregations for Cloud Monitoring metrics and…

google/skills · 74 tokens

google-cloud-storage-basics

Stores, retrieves, and manages data as objects in Cloud Storage (Google Cloud Storage, or GCS) buckets. Use when you need to interact with Cloud Storage — create or configure buckets, upload, download, stream, or transfer data, organize objects with folders, generate signed URLs, control access (IAM, ACLs, public…

google/skills · 210 tokens

gke-node-notready

Diagnoses GKE nodes reporting NotReady or Unknown status by inspecting node conditions, events, kubelet/containerd logs, and node metrics, then proposing safe remediations. Use when nodes show NotReady, when the kubelet stops posting node status, or when workloads are evicted or stuck Pending due to node health. Don't…

google/skills · 112 tokens