What problem does it solve? Production features often ship without telemetry, so when something breaks, engineers cannot tell what happened from the available data. This Skill guides you to instrument code alongside the feature itself, so every production behavior is visible, queryable, and diagnosable before the first incident. ## Core Features & Use Cases - Structured Logging: Enforces JSON log events with stable event names, mandatory correlation IDs, entry-point attribution, and strict rules against logging secrets or PII. - Metrics and Tracing: Applies RED (Rate, Errors, Duration) and USE (Utilization, Saturation, Errors) methods with bounded label cardinality, histogram-based latency percentiles, and OpenTelemetry distributed tracing. - Symptom-Based Alerting and Runbooks: Defines alerts on user-facing symptoms rather than causes, requires every alert to link a runbook, and includes a verification checklist to test-fire alerts and validate telemetry end-to-end. - Use Case: When adding a payment retry flow with an external provider, use this Skill to define the on-call questions first, then add structured payment_failed log events, a latency histogram for provider calls, a trace across services, and an alert on elevated error rate with a linked runbook. ## Quick Start Use the observability-and-instrumentation skill to add structured logging, RED metrics, tracing, and an alert with a runbook to my new checkout endpoint.
