observability-designer

observability-designer is a skill for Claude Code, Codex from tmj-90/gaffer. It costs 67 tokens per session (845 once invoked), scanned A, original, Apache-2.0.

A design guide for monitoring software through metrics, logs, and traces—the three main ways to see what a running service is doing.

In plain words
What is it for?
Plan dashboards, service monitoring, structured logs, request tracing, and alerts around latency, traffic, errors, and resource use.
Why use it?
It helps operators find failures and their causes while reducing noisy or unhelpful alerts.

Skill for Claude CodeCodex

Written for no agent in particular: nothing here depends on one.

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/tmj-90/gaffer/observability-designer
Any agent
npx skills add tmj-90/gaffer --skill observability-designer
Clone the repo
git clone --depth 1 https://github.com/tmj-90/gaffer

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 observability-designer

README.md
[![agentmods](https://agentmods.dev/badge/skills/tmj-90/gaffer/observability-designer.svg)](https://agentmods.dev/skills/tmj-90/gaffer/observability-designer)
Your own site
<a href="https://agentmods.dev/skills/tmj-90/gaffer/observability-designer"><img src="https://agentmods.dev/badge/skills/tmj-90/gaffer/observability-designer.svg" alt="Measured on agentmods" height="20"></a>
Per session 67 Skills are progressive disclosure: only the name and description are preloaded; the body loads when the skill is used.
When invoked 845 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 5.1 $0.00067 $0.00845
Opus 5 $0.00034 $0.00423
Sonnet 5 $0.00013 $0.00169
Haiku 4.5 $0.00007 $0.00085

Measured 6d ago against content hash 24db902f962a, method: parsed. Prices are Anthropic first-party input rates as of 2026-09-06, from the pricing page.

Security

Grade A, and why

observability-designer 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 6d 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.

runner/skills/observability-designer/SKILL.md · 57 lines

How it starts

The opening of the file, as written. The whole thing — 57 lines — stays where its author put it; the contents beside it link to each section on GitHub.

Design production-ready observability

Instrument services so operators know what is broken, why, and where — before users notice. Three pillars, golden signals, low-noise alerting.

The three pillars

Pillar Purpose Key decision
Metrics Rate, latency, saturation at a glance RED method for services; USE method for resources
Logs Structured event trail with correlation IDs JSON, log-level discipline, sample high-volume streams
Traces End-to-end request flow across services Meaningful span boundaries; tail-based sampling for slow/erroring requests

Golden signals to define first: latency, traffic, errors, saturation — cover these before anything else.

Steps

  1. Read the lore first. search_lore for existing observability decisions (dashboards, alert channels, on-call runbooks, APM tooling). Extend in place; don't duplicate.
  2. Identify the service contract. What does this service promise users? That contract → the SLIs. Route SLO/error-budget design to slo-architect.
  3. Design dashboards. Overview → service → component drill-down. Max 7±2 panels per screen; colour semantics (red = critical, amber = warning, green = healthy); SLO target reference lines.
  4. Define alert thresholds. Prefer symptom-based over cause-based alerts. Require every alert to have: condition, severity, runbook link, on-call owner. Suppress during known maintenance.
  5. Reduce noise. Deduplicate, set appropriate alert-evaluation windows, distinguish pager alerts (must wake someone) from dashboard-only signals.
  6. Verify + evidence. Deploy to staging, confirm every golden-signal panel renders with live data; run record-evidence with test output; submit for review.

Build / Test

  • Validate dashboard JSON against the target platform's schema (Grafana, Datadog, CloudWatch) before committing.
  • Alert configs: dry-run evaluation against recent telemetry; confirm alert-to-runbook coverage is 1:1.
  • Structured logging: emit a test event and confirm all required fields appear in the aggregation layer.

Read the full file on GitHub · 57 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. 6d ago First seen · 57 lines · 67 tokens per session scan A 24db902f962a

Subscribe to this mod's changes

observability-designer is a skill published in the GitHub repository tmj-90/gaffer (2 stars, last pushed 6d ago), licensed Apache-2.0. It adds 67 tokens to every session and 845 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.