What problem does it solve? Production features often ship without telemetry, so when incidents occur engineers cannot tell what happened from the available data. This Skill guides you to instrument code alongside the feature so production behavior is visible and diagnosable from day one. ## Core Features & Use Cases - Structured Logging: Enforces JSON log events with stable event names, consistent log levels, and mandatory correlation/request IDs propagated across services. - Metrics and Tracing: Applies RED (Rate, Errors, Duration) and USE (Utilization, Saturation, Errors) methods with bounded label cardinality, plus OpenTelemetry-based distributed tracing with context propagation. - Symptom-Based Alerting: Designs actionable alerts tied to user-facing symptoms with runbook links, and verifies telemetry by inducing failures in staging. - Use Case: When adding a payment retry flow, use this Skill to define the on-call questions first, then add structured payment_failed log events, a latency histogram for the provider, trace spans across services, and an error-rate alert with a runbook. ## Quick Start Use the observability-and-instrumentation skill to add structured logging, RED metrics, tracing, and a symptom-based alert to my new checkout endpoint.
