observability

observability is a skill for Claude Code, Codex from srstomp/pokayokay. It costs 56 tokens per session (447 once invoked), scanned A, original, MIT.

A guide to making software easier to understand and monitor through logs, measurements, and request traces. Logs record events, metrics show quantities over time, and traces follow a request across services.

In plain words
What is it for?
Use it when adding structured logs, monitoring, alerts, service health targets, or tracing with tools such as Pino, Prometheus, CloudWatch, DataDog, or OpenTelemetry.
Why use it?
It helps developers find production problems and see whether users are affected, instead of guessing from scattered system data.

Skill for Claude CodeCodex

Part of the pokayokay plugin — 24 skills, 23 commands, 14 agents, 4 hooks, 1 MCP server shipped together

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/srstomp/pokayokay/observability
Any agent
npx skills add srstomp/pokayokay --skill observability
Clone the repo
git clone --depth 1 https://github.com/srstomp/pokayokay

Made for: Claude Code, Codex.

Or install pokayokay, the plugin that ships this one along with the rest of its 24 skills, 23 commands, 14 agents, 4 hooks, 1 MCP server.

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 observability

README.md
[![agentmods](https://agentmods.dev/badge/skills/srstomp/pokayokay/observability.svg)](https://agentmods.dev/skills/srstomp/pokayokay/observability)
Your own site
<a href="https://agentmods.dev/skills/srstomp/pokayokay/observability"><img src="https://agentmods.dev/badge/skills/srstomp/pokayokay/observability.svg" alt="Measured on agentmods" height="20"></a>
Per session 56 Skills are progressive disclosure: only the name and description are preloaded; the body loads when the skill is used.
When invoked 447 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 $0.00056 $0.00447
Opus 5 $0.00028 $0.00224
Sonnet 5 $0.00011 $0.00089
Haiku 4.5 $0.00006 $0.00045

Measured 4d ago against content hash 50359f019f8e, method: parsed. Prices are Anthropic first-party input rates as of 2026-08-30, from the pricing page.

Security

Grade A, and why

observability 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 4d 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.

plugins/pokayokay/skills/observability/SKILL.md · 49 lines

What it actually says

Observability

Implement the three pillars of observability: logs, metrics, and traces.

The Three Pillars

Pillar Purpose Key Question
Logs Discrete events with context What happened?
Metrics Aggregated measurements How much/many?
Traces Request flow across services Where did time go?

Quick Pick

  • Debug specific request? → Logs + Traces
  • Alert on thresholds? → Metrics
  • Understand system health? → All three
  • Starting from zero? → Logs first, then metrics, then traces

Key Principles

  • Use structured logging (JSON) with correlation IDs across all services
  • Instrument the four golden signals: latency, traffic, errors, saturation
  • Define SLIs/SLOs before building dashboards or alerts
  • Alert on symptoms (user impact), not causes (CPU usage)

Quick Start Checklist

  1. Set up structured logger (Pino recommended for Node.js)
  2. Add request correlation IDs (middleware)
  3. Instrument key metrics (RED: Rate, Errors, Duration)
  4. Configure distributed tracing (OpenTelemetry)
  5. Create dashboards for golden signals
  6. Set up alerts with appropriate severity levels

References

Reference Description
logging-patterns.md Structured logging, log levels, Pino/Winston setup
metrics-guide.md Prometheus, counters/gauges/histograms, golden signals
tracing-basics.md OpenTelemetry, distributed tracing, span design
alerting-guide.md Alert design, SLIs/SLOs, severity levels, dashboards
Files

What ships with it

4 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. 4d ago First seen · 49 lines · 56 tokens per session scan A 50359f019f8e

Subscribe to this mod's changes

observability is a skill published in the GitHub repository srstomp/pokayokay (9 stars, last pushed 2mo ago), licensed MIT. It adds 56 tokens to every session and 447 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 2026-08-31.

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