observability-standards

Instruments services with OpenTelemetry logging, golden signal metrics, SLOs, alerts, and runbooks.

Updated May 21, 2026
One-click install
npx skills add https://github.com/CagesThrottleUs/private-ai-harness --skill observability-standards-cagesthrottleus
Or copy as Structured Prompt for Agent
Please help me install this Agent Skill.
Skill: observability-standards
Source: https://github.com/CagesThrottleUs/private-ai-harness/tree/main/skills/observability-standards
Command: npx skills add https://github.com/CagesThrottleUs/private-ai-harness --skill observability-standards-cagesthrottleus

SYSTEM DOCUMENTATION & REQUIREMENTS

What problem does it solve? New API endpoints and services often ship without any logging, metrics, or alerting, leaving teams blind during the first production incident. This Skill instruments a system for production at endpoint creation time, before anything is deployed. ## Core Features & Use Cases - Structured Logging Setup: Generates OpenTelemetry-compliant JSON logging configuration with the six mandatory fields (timestamp, severity, trace_id, span_id, service.name, body) for Python, Go, TypeScript, Java, and Rust. - Golden Signal Metrics: Instruments latency histograms, request counters, error counters, and saturation gauges per endpoint using the OpenTelemetry SDK. - SLO, Alert, and Runbook Generation: Produces an SLO definition document with error budget policy, symptom-based alert rules (including burn-rate alerts), and a runbook per alert. - Use Case: After creating a new checkout API endpoint, run this Skill to generate structured logging config, Prometheus alert rules, an SLO document with a 99.9% availability target, and runbooks for high-error-rate and high-latency alerts, then validate everything with the observability-reviewer agent. ## Quick Start Ask the AI to instrument the newly created API endpoints with structured logging, golden signal metrics, SLOs, alert rules, and runbooks before deployment.

Frequently Asked Questions about observability-standards

High-intent search queries and answers about installing and using this skill.

FAQPage Schema
How do I add structured logging to a Python API?

Use structlog configured with JSONRenderer, ISO 8601 UTC timestamps, and contextvars to bind trace_id, span_id, and service_name to every log entry. Every log must contain the six OpenTelemetry fields: timestamp, severity, trace_id, span_id, service.name, and body.

What are the four golden signals of monitoring?

The four golden signals from the Google SRE Book are latency, traffic, errors, and saturation. Instrument them per endpoint with a latency histogram, request counter, error counter, and saturation gauge using the OpenTelemetry SDK.

How do I write SLOs with error budgets?

Define an SLI as good events divided by total events, set a target such as 99.9% over a 28-day window, and treat the remainder as your error budget. When the budget is exhausted, freeze feature deploys and ship only critical fixes until it recovers.

Should I alert on CPU usage or on latency?

Alert on symptoms like latency and error rate, not causes like CPU or memory. PagerDuty alerting principles recommend paging only on user impact; system internals belong on dashboards for diagnosis.

When should observability instrumentation be skipped?

Skip it for pure refactoring with no new endpoints, internal utility functions, config changes, and documentation-only work. It is required whenever a task creates an external-facing component such as an API endpoint, background worker, or service boundary.