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 seaworld008/Commonly-used-high-value-skills --skill observability-and-instrumentationgit clone --depth 1 https://github.com/seaworld008/Commonly-used-high-value-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/seaworld008/commonly-used-high-value-skills/observability-and-instrumentation)<a href="https://agentmods.dev/skills/seaworld008/commonly-used-high-value-skills/observability-and-instrumentation"><img src="https://agentmods.dev/badge/skills/seaworld008/commonly-used-high-value-skills/observability-and-instrumentation/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.
<a href="https://agentmods.dev/skills/seaworld008/commonly-used-high-value-skills/observability-and-instrumentation"><img src="https://agentmods.dev/badge/skills/seaworld008/commonly-used-high-value-skills/observability-and-instrumentation.svg" alt="Reviewed on agentmods" width="80" 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 | $0.00031 | $0.02722 |
| Opus 5 | $0.00015 | $0.01361 |
| Sonnet 5 | $0.00006 | $0.00544 |
| Haiku 4.5 | $0.00003 | $0.00272 |
Grade A, and why
observability-and-instrumentation 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 5d 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.
This is a copy
95% identical to observability-and-instrumentation — 58 lines differ, which has more behind it and is treated as the original. This page carries a canonical link to it rather than competing with it.
How it starts
The opening of the file, as written. The whole thing — 223 lines — stays where its author put it; the contents beside it link to each section on GitHub.
Observability and Instrumentation
Overview
Code you can't observe is code you can't operate. Observability is the ability to answer "what is the system doing and why?" from the outside, using the telemetry the code emits. Instrumentation is not a post-launch add-on — it's written alongside the feature, the same way tests are. If a feature ships without telemetry, the first user-reported bug becomes archaeology instead of a query.
When to Use
- Building any feature that will run in production
- Adding a new service, endpoint, background job, or external integration
- A production incident took too long to diagnose ("we couldn't tell what happened")
- Setting up or reviewing alerting rules
- Reviewing a PR that adds I/O, retries, queues, or cross-service calls
NOT for:
- Diagnosing a failure happening right now — use the
debugging-and-error-recoveryskill (observability is what makes that skill fast next time) - Profiling and optimizing measured slowness — use the
performance-optimizationskill - Launch-day monitoring checklists and rollback triggers — see the
shipping-and-launchskill; this skill covers the instrumentation that feeds them
Process
1. Define "working" before instrumenting
Telemetry without a question is noise. Before adding any instrumentation, write down 2–4 questions an on-call engineer will ask about this feature:
FEATURE: checkout payment retry
QUESTIONS ON-CALL WILL ASK:
1. What fraction of payments succeed on first attempt vs after retry?
2. When a payment fails permanently, why? (provider error? timeout? validation?)
3. Is the payment provider slower than usual?
→ Every signal below must help answer one of these.
If you can't name the questions, you're not ready to instrument — you'll log everything and learn nothing.
2. Pick the right signal for each question
| Signal | Answers | Cost profile | Example |
|---|---|---|---|
| Structured log | "What happened in this specific case?" | Per-event; grows with traffic | payment_failed with provider error code |
| Metric | "How often / how fast, in aggregate?" | Fixed per series; cheap to query | p99 latency of provider calls |
| Trace | "Where did time go across services?" | Per-request; usually sampled | One slow checkout, broken down by hop |
What ships with it
7 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.
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.
- 5d ago Changed · +7 lines · -35 tokens per session c5e23550d345
- 9d ago First seen · 216 lines · 66 tokens per session scan A d814e7fb3ef0
observability-and-instrumentation is a skill published in the GitHub repository seaworld008/Commonly-used-high-value-skills (70 stars, last pushed 5d ago), licensed MIT. It adds 31 tokens to every session and 2,722 once invoked, about $0.0002 per session on Opus 5. A static security scan graded it A with 0 findings. It is 95% identical to observability-and-instrumentation, differing in 58 lines, and is treated as a copy.
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