create-observability

A monitoring plan for a software feature covering logs, metrics, distributed traces, and alerts. It defines how production health should be observed before implementation begins.

In plain words
What is it for?
Use it to plan feature monitoring, health checks, alerts, state-transition tracking, and links to business metrics.
Why use it?
It helps teams detect failures, understand their causes, and give on-call engineers clear response information.

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

Made for: Claude Code, Codex.

Per session 28 Skills are progressive disclosure: only the name and description are preloaded; the body loads when the skill is used.
When invoked 1,633 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 $0.00028 $0.01633
Opus 5 $0.00014 $0.00816
Sonnet 5 $0.00006 $0.00327
Haiku 4.5 $0.00003 $0.00163

Measured 2d ago against content hash d80f03f6a62c, method: parsed. Prices are Anthropic first-party input rates as of 2026-08-30, from the pricing page.

Security

Grade A, and why

create-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 2d 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/create-observability/SKILL.md · 120 lines

How it starts

The opening of the file, as written. The whole thing — 120 lines — stays where its author put it; the contents beside it link to each section on GitHub.

Create Observability

Defines how a feature's production health will be monitored by identifying log statements, service metrics, distributed traces, and alerts before implementation begins.

Without this step, features ship blind: outages go undetected, root causes take hours to find, and on-call engineers lack runbooks.

Prerequisites

  • Apply the shared SDLC conventions in skills/sdlc/references/shared.md.
  • If no argument is provided, locate the feature directory under .sdlc/features/ whose frontmatter issue field references $ISSUE_NUMBER.
  • .sdlc/features/N-<slug>/specification.md (must have passed review with findings verdict approved), or a specification document provided in context or as a file path ($1)
  • .sdlc/features/N-<slug>/lifecycle.md (optional, if a lifecycle document was produced): monitor state transitions, invariant violations, and retention cleanup as part of observability
  • .sdlc/features/N-<slug>/telemetry.md (optional, if a telemetry plan was produced): align observability with business metrics already defined
  • .sdlc/features/N-<slug>/requirements.md (optional, for cross-referencing NFRs like latency and availability targets)

Steps

  1. Read the specification, lifecycle document (if present), telemetry plan (if present), and requirements.
  2. Identify the critical paths and failure modes from the specification.
  3. For each critical path, determine what log entries are needed for debugging.
  4. Define service-level metrics (counters, histograms, gauges) that reflect system health.
  5. Identify where distributed traces should be emitted for cross-service flows.
  6. Define health checks and readiness probes for new services or endpoints.
  7. Specify alerts with clear conditions, severity, and runbook links. When the monitoring stack is Prometheus-compatible, write the normative alert definitions to .sdlc/features/N-<slug>/alerts.yaml (Prometheus rule format, template at skills/sdlc/templates/features/alerts.yaml) and keep the per-alert tables in the document as the human-readable summary. Validate best-effort with promtool check rules alerts.yaml when available; a missing tool is skipped, a validation failure is a defect to fix before handoff.
  8. Determine observability infrastructure requirements (existing vs. new instrumentation).
  9. Write the output to .sdlc/features/N-<slug>/observability.md (plus alerts.yaml when alerts are defined and the stack is Prometheus-compatible).

Read the full file on GitHub · 120 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. 2d ago First seen · 120 lines · 28 tokens per session scan A d80f03f6a62c

Subscribe to this mod's changes

create-observability is a skill published in the GitHub repository tomzx/agents (5 stars, last pushed 5d ago), licensed MIT. It adds 28 tokens to every session and 1,633 once invoked, about $0.0001 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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