Service Mesh Observability

A solid implementation guide for getting observability working across Istio and Linkerd deployments. Sets up the full stack with Prometheus metrics, Jaeger tracing, and Grafana dashboards, plus includes the specific PromQL queries you actually need for golden signals like P99 latency and error rates. The templates cover both quick Linkerd CLI debugging and production Kiali topology visualization. Honest take: the Istio setup is more complex but gives you finer control, while Linkerd's built-in viz extension gets you running faster. Most useful when you're past the basic mesh setup and need to debug why services are slow or failing.

skills.sh installs: 10.7K
GitHub stars: 42.4K
last updated: Aug 21, 2026

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Install

$ npx -y skills add wshobson/agents --skill service-mesh-observability --agent claude-code

Installs into .claude/skills of the current project.

Files

Service Mesh Observability

Complete guide to observability patterns for Istio, Linkerd, and service mesh deployments.

When to Use This Skill

Setting up distributed tracing across services
Implementing service mesh metrics and dashboards
Debugging latency and error issues
Defining SLOs for service communication
Visualizing service dependencies
Troubleshooting mesh connectivity

Core Concepts

1. Three Pillars of Observability

┌─────────────────────────────────────────────────────┐
│                  Observability                       │
├─────────────────┬─────────────────┬─────────────────┤
│     Metrics     │     Traces      │      Logs       │
│                 │                 │                 │
│ • Request rate  │ • Span context  │ • Access logs   │
│ • Error rate    │ • Latency       │ • Error details │
│ • Latency P50   │ • Dependencies  │ • Debug info    │
│ • Saturation    │ • Bottlenecks   │ • Audit trail   │
└─────────────────┴─────────────────┴─────────────────┘