observability-readiness

name	observability-readiness
description	Verify that a deployment is observable before promotion. Use when DevOps must check logs, metrics, traces, dashboards, alerts, health endpoints, synthetic probes, SLO/error-budget signals, correlation IDs, runbook links, and incident triage evidence without exposing credentials or sensitive telemetry.
agents	["devops"]
sdlc_phase	deploy
owner	Platform Eng
status	active

Observability Readiness

When to use

Use this skill before staging/production deployment, before enabling traffic, and during release readiness for features whose failure needs operational detection.

Inputs and outputs

• Inputs: architecture/instrumentation contract, service list, health endpoints, expected logs/metrics/traces, dashboards/alerts, target environment, and incident runbook references.
• Outputs: observability readiness verdict, missing telemetry findings, dashboard/alert references, smoke probe evidence, and deploy-report observability fields.

Procedure

1. Map critical signals. For each deployed service, identify health endpoint, readiness/liveness signal, key logs, metrics, traces, and business/user-impact indicators.
2. Check deploy-time telemetry. Verify the new version emits startup logs, request logs, errors, latency, saturation/resource metrics, background job signals, and dependency health.
3. Verify correlation. Confirm request IDs/correlation IDs connect frontend, backend, workers, and external calls where applicable.
4. Confirm dashboards and alerts. Record dashboard names/links and alert names/status. Use names or URLs only; do not include tokens or private query credentials.
5. Define smoke/synthetic probes. List post-deploy probes for user flows, API health, queues, scheduled jobs, and external integrations.
6. Check runbook path. Ensure a human can move from alert to runbook to rollback/mitigation path.
7. Emit verdict. ready, ready-with-gaps, or blocked.

Hard rules

• Never promote a high-risk deployment with no health signal, no alert, and no rollback trigger.
• Never expose sensitive logs, PII, auth headers, trace baggage, API keys, or dashboard tokens.
• Never treat "container running" as observability readiness.
• Never invent SLOs or alert thresholds; record missing contracts as follow-up work.
• Never mark observability ready when incident responders cannot identify service/version/environment from telemetry.

References

• ../release-readiness/SKILL.md - release gate that consumes this verdict.
• ../rollback-readiness/SKILL.md - rollback trigger thresholds.
• ../../agents/_templates/devops.md - deploy-report expectations.