monitoring-observability

name	monitoring-observability
description	Provides monitoring and observability best practices covering the three pillars (logs, metrics, traces), OpenTelemetry instrumentation, Prometheus/Grafana dashboards, SLO-based alerting, and APM strategies. Use when setting up monitoring, observability, prometheus, grafana, opentelemetry, alerting, tracing, logging, metrics, dashboards, SLOs, or APM.
type	skill
category	ops
status	stable
origin	tibsfox
modified	false
first_seen	"2026-02-07T00:00:00.000Z"
first_path	examples/monitoring-observability/SKILL.md
superseded_by	null

Monitoring and Observability

Production systems require visibility into their behavior. Observability goes beyond simple monitoring by enabling you to ask arbitrary questions about system state using logs, metrics, and traces. This guide covers instrumentation, collection, visualization, alerting, and the operational patterns that prevent alert fatigue while keeping systems reliable.

The Three Pillars

Pillar	What It Captures	Best For	Key Tools
Logs	Discrete events with context	Debugging specific requests, audit trails	ELK, Loki, CloudWatch Logs
Metrics	Numeric measurements over time	Trends, thresholds, capacity planning	Prometheus, Datadog, CloudWatch Metrics
Traces	Request flow across services	Latency breakdown, dependency mapping	Jaeger, Tempo, X-Ray

Question	Signal
"Why did this request fail?"	Logs (event detail) + Traces (call chain)
"Is error rate increasing?"	Metrics (counters over time)
"Which service is slow?"	Traces (span timing)
"What happened at 3:42 AM?"	Logs (timestamped events)
"Are we within SLO budget?"	Metrics (error ratio, latency percentiles)
"How do services depend on each other?"	Traces (service graph)

OpenTelemetry SDK Setup

OpenTelemetry provides a vendor-neutral API for emitting all three signals. Instrument once, export anywhere.

Node.js Auto-Instrumentation

// tracing.ts -- Load BEFORE application code
import { NodeSDK } from '@opentelemetry/sdk-node';
import { OTLPTraceExporter } from '@opentelemetry/exporter-trace-otlp-http';
import { OTLPMetricExporter } from ;
 {  }  ;
 { getNodeAutoInstrumentations }  ;
 {  }  ;
 { ,  }  ;

 sdk =  ({
  :  ({
    []: ,
    []: process.. || ,
  }),
  :  ({
    : process.. || ,
  }),
  :  ({
    :  (),
    : ,
  }),
  : [
    ({
      : { :  },
      : {
        : [, , ],
      },
    }),
  ],
});

sdk.();
process.(,  sdk.().( process.()));