observability-and-instrumentation

An agent skill by addyosmani, from addyosmani/agent-skills. Tags: api, debugging, developer-tools, web.

What it does

Instruments code so production behavior is visible and diagnosable. Use when adding logging, metrics, tracing, or alerting. Use when shipping any feature that runs in production and you need evidence it works. Use when production issues are reported but you can't tell what happened from the available data.

Install

With the skills CLI, which installs into Claude Code, Codex, Cursor and other agents:

npx skills add addyosmani/agent-skills --skill observability-and-instrumentation

Or copy the skill folder into Claude Code's skills directory by hand (~/.claude/skills for every project, or .claude/skills inside one):

git clone --depth 1 https://github.com/addyosmani/agent-skills
cp -r agent-skills/skills/observability-and-instrumentation ~/.claude/skills/observability-and-instrumentation

Safety box score

Grade A, minimal risk: 0 of 100 risk points, rated 2026-09-25. The grade rates what the skill and its scripts can reach on the machine of whoever installs it, across eight categories from shell execution to secrets access. How the score works.

This skill is a documentation-only guide for adding logs, metrics, traces, and alerting to production code. It does not ship scripts or commands, but it does steer changes to observability plumbing that will affect how production behavior is recorded and diagnosed.

Category levels, from 0 (none) to 3 (high)
Category	Level	Why
Code & shell execution	0 (none)	`SKILL.md` contains only prose and examples; there are no shell commands, scripts, or code that would execute on the machine.
Network access	0 (none)	It describes telemetry concepts and mentions OpenTelemetry, but it does not download from or send data to any specific remote host itself.
Filesystem reach	0 (none)	The only filesystem guidance is to keep runbooks in `docs/runbooks/`; it does not read, write, or delete outside the project.
Secrets & credentials	0 (none)	It explicitly warns, "Never log secrets, tokens, passwords, or full PII," and does not access secret stores or ask for credentials.
Privilege & persistence	0 (none)	No sudo, global installs, services, shell startup edits, or OS settings changes are present.
Instruction hijack surface	0 (none)	There is no prompt-injection content telling an agent to ignore instructions, hide actions, or follow remote text.
Irreversible actions	0 (none)	The skill recommends instrumentation and alerting only; it does not push, publish, delete, pay, or otherwise take external actions.
Transparency	0 (none)	The file is plain, human-readable markdown with no binaries, minified code, base64 blobs, or unpinned installers.

Before installing

Review any generated logging code to ensure it does not include secrets, tokens, or full request bodies.
Check that any runbook or alert docs stay in-repo under `docs/runbooks/` and do not introduce external publishing steps.
If you later add tooling around this skill, verify it does not pull unpinned remote code or require shell/profile changes.

Rated 2026-09-25 by an automated review of 1 file from the skill's repository.

Source

Repository: addyosmani/agent-skills (all skills from this repository)
Path: skills/observability-and-instrumentation/SKILL.md
Branch: main
Updated: 2026-09-19

debugging-and-error-recovery — Guides systematic root-cause debugging.
performance-optimization — Optimizes application performance across frontend, backend, queries, and databases.
security-and-hardening — Hardens code against vulnerabilities.
systematic-debugging — Use when encountering any bug, test failure, or unexpected behavior, before proposing fixes
browser-testing-with-devtools — Tests in real browsers via Chrome DevTools MCP. Use when building or debugging anything that runs in a browser.
deprecation-and-migration — Manages deprecation and migration. Use when removing old systems, APIs, or features. Use when migrating users from one implementation to another.