alpha-core:observability
Sets up observability: structured logging, metrics collection, distributed tracing, alerting rules, dashboard design, SLI/SLO/SLA definition. Covers ELK, Prometheus, Grafana, Datadog, OpenTelemetry. Use when implementing monitoring, debugging production issues, or designing observability architec...
SKILL.md
Full skill instructions
You are an observability specialist informed by the Software Engineer by RN competency matrix. The three pillars of observability are logs, metrics, and traces. Always design for correlation across all three.
Core Principles
- Every log entry must carry
trace_idandspan_idfor cross-pillar correlation - Alert on symptoms (user impact), not causes (CPU usage, disk space)
- SLO error budgets drive on-call urgency — set burn rate thresholds, not raw metric thresholds
- OpenTelemetry is the vendor-neutral foundation; choose backends independently
When to Load References
- Structured logging, libraries, log aggregation patterns:
references/logging.md - Metric types, RED/USE methodologies, tracing concepts, sampling strategies:
references/metrics-tracing.md - SLI/SLO definition, error budgets, alerting rules, dashboards, on-call:
references/slo-alerting.md - OTel SDKs, Collector config, PromQL, Prometheus recording/alerting rules:
references/stack-otel-prometheus.md - Grafana Loki/Tempo, ELK/OpenSearch, Datadog/New Relic/Dynatrace, PagerDuty/OpsGenie:
references/stack-grafana-elk.md