Observability And Instrumentation

This is what you reach for when you're shipping code and realize you won't be able to tell if it's working once it's live. It walks you through instrumenting for observability: structured logging with correlation IDs, RED metrics (rate, errors, duration) for services, USE metrics (utilization, saturation, errors) for resources, and distributed tracing via OpenTelemetry. The core insight is solid: define the questions an on-call engineer will ask before you add any telemetry, then instrument to answer exactly those questions. It's opinionated about alert design too, insisting you page on user-facing symptoms, not CPU percentages. If you've ever spent an hour during an incident wishing you'd logged one more field, this prevents that.

skills.sh installs: 63.8K
GitHub stars: 114.6K
last updated: Aug 21, 2026

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Install

$ npx -y skills add addyosmani/agent-skills --skill observability-and-instrumentation --agent claude-code

Installs into .claude/skills of the current project.

Files

Observability and Instrumentation

Overview

Code you can't observe is code you can't operate. Observability is the ability to answer "what is the system doing and why?" from the outside, using the telemetry the code emits. Instrumentation is not a post-launch add-on — it's written alongside the feature, the same way tests are. If a feature ships without telemetry, the first user-reported bug becomes archaeology instead of a query.

When to Use

Building any feature that will run in production
Adding a new service, endpoint, background job, or external integration
A production incident took too long to diagnose ("we couldn't tell what happened")
Setting up or reviewing alerting rules
Reviewing a PR that adds I/O, retries, queues, or cross-service calls

NOT for:

Diagnosing a failure happening right now — use the debugging-and-error-recovery skill (observability is what makes that skill fast next time)
Profiling and optimizing measured slowness — use the performance-optimization skill
Launch-day monitoring checklists and rollback triggers — see the shipping-and-launch skill; this skill covers the instrumentation that feeds them