observability

Original：🇺🇸 English

Translated

Use when adding logging to services, setting up monitoring, creating alerts, debugging production issues, designing SLIs/SLOs, or implementing structured logging (Pino, Winston), metrics (Prometheus, DataDog, CloudWatch), or distributed tracing (OpenTelemetry).

1installs

Sourcesrstomp/pokayokay

Added on2026-02-18

NPX Install

npx skill4agent add srstomp/pokayokay observability

SKILL.md Content

View Translation Comparison →

Observability

Implement the three pillars of observability: logs, metrics, and traces.

The Three Pillars

Pillar	Purpose	Key Question
Logs	Discrete events with context	What happened?
Metrics	Aggregated measurements	How much/many?
Traces	Request flow across services	Where did time go?

Quick Pick

Debug specific request? → Logs + Traces
Alert on thresholds? → Metrics
Understand system health? → All three
Starting from zero? → Logs first, then metrics, then traces

Key Principles

Use structured logging (JSON) with correlation IDs across all services
Instrument the four golden signals: latency, traffic, errors, saturation
Define SLIs/SLOs before building dashboards or alerts
Alert on symptoms (user impact), not causes (CPU usage)

Quick Start Checklist

Set up structured logger (Pino recommended for Node.js)
Add request correlation IDs (middleware)
Instrument key metrics (RED: Rate, Errors, Duration)
Configure distributed tracing (OpenTelemetry)
Create dashboards for golden signals
Set up alerts with appropriate severity levels

References

Reference	Description
logging-patterns.md	Structured logging, log levels, Pino/Winston setup
metrics-guide.md	Prometheus, counters/gauges/histograms, golden signals
tracing-basics.md	OpenTelemetry, distributed tracing, span design
alerting-guide.md	Alert design, SLIs/SLOs, severity levels, dashboards