What problem does it solve? Production features often ship without telemetry, so when incidents occur engineers cannot tell what happened from the available data. This Skill guides you to instrument code alongside the feature so production behavior is visible and diagnosable from day one. ## Core Features & Use Cases - Structured Logging: Enforces JSON log events with stable event names, consistent log levels, mandatory correlation/request IDs, and strict rules against logging secrets or PII. - Metrics and Tracing: Applies RED (Rate, Errors, Duration) and USE (Utilization, Saturation, Errors) methods with histogram-based latency, cardinality-safe labels, and OpenTelemetry distributed tracing with context propagation. - Symptom-Based Alerting: Defines actionable alerts tied to user-facing symptoms with runbook links, thresholds, and two severity tiers, plus a verification step that test-fires alerts and validates telemetry end-to-end. - Use Case: When adding a payment retry flow with external provider calls, use this Skill to define the on-call questions first, then emit structured payment_failed events, RED metrics on the provider dependency, and an alert on elevated error rate. ## Quick Start Use the observability-and-instrumentation skill to add structured logging, RED metrics, and OpenTelemetry tracing to my new checkout endpoint.
