Review Observability

Observability Review

Structured review of logging, metrics, and tracing sufficiency. Producing actionable, prioritized findings with code-level references.

Out of scope (defer to siblings):

• Health/readiness probes, gRPC health, retry/timeout semantics → review-reliability
• Log injection, PII leakage, log-as-attack-channel → review-security (but flag obvious secret-in-log here as well)
• Dashboard / alert authoring (where to set thresholds) → typically out of scope; observability review covers signal availability, not alert tuning

Workflow

1. Scope and explore

• Confirm scope with the user: full codebase, specific packages/directories, changed files only (PR or branch diff), or specific concern.
• Resolve scope to a file/package list. Based on what the user requested:
• Changed files (PR or branch): Run git diff --name-only --diff-filter=d ...HEAD. If the user references a PR number, use gh pr diff --name-only. Filter to source files (.go, .ts, .tsx, .js, .py, etc.) and configs (prometheus.yml, otel-collector-config.yaml).
• Explicit paths/packages: Include all files under given directories.
• Full codebase: No filtering.
• If invoked from review-all: receive file_list, package_paths, has_changes, base_ref, REVIEW_DIR, and pr_url from the orchestrator. Skip your own scope confirmation.
• Pass the resolved scope to all exploration and investigation subagents.

2. System overview

Produce a brief telemetry summary covering:

• Logging library/sink: structured (slog, zap, zerolog, logrus) vs. unstructured (fmt.Println, log.Printf). Output sink (stdout, file, syslog, log aggregator).
• Metrics library/exporter: Prometheus client, OTel metrics, statsd. Where scraping happens.
• Tracing library/exporter: OTel tracer, vendor-specific (Datadog, Honeycomb, Jaeger). Sampling strategy.
• Correlation: are trace IDs threaded through logs (e.g. slog.With("trace_id", ...))? Are span context propagated across RPC boundaries (otelgrpc, otelhttp)?
• Collector / pipeline: is there an OTel Collector in the path? What processors and exporters?

3. Launch investigation subagent

Launch a single investigation subagent (subagent_type="generalPurpose", model: sonnet per subagent-model-routing) with the system overview and in-scope file list.

Prompt it to:

• Read all in-scope source files and any observability config files (Prometheus, OTel Collector, dashboard JSON).
• Apply the checklists in [reference.md](reference.md):
• Logging sufficiency and structure
• Metrics sufficiency and cardinality
• Tracing sufficiency and propagation
• Correlation across signals
• Identify gaps: RPC handlers without spans, error paths without log entries, hot loops emitting per-iteration metrics, unbounded label values.
• For each finding, search nearby code for existing tracking (TODO/FIXME/HACK).
• Return findings using the observability findings template.

4. Run static analyzers (when applicable)

Most observability gaps are not lint-discoverable; the work is semantic. A few mechanical checks:

# Go: find packages spawning goroutines/RPC handlers without otel instrumentation
# (these are heuristics for the subagent to triage, not gates)
grep -rl "http.HandleFunc\|grpc.NewServer" --include='*.go' 
grep -rL "otelhttp\|otelgrpc\|otel\.Tracer" --include='*.go' 

# Cardinality smell: dynamic strings in metric labels
grep -rn "\.With(prometheus\.Labels{" --include='*.go' 
grep -rn "labels\.NewBuilder\|labels.FromMap" --include='*.go' 

These are inputs for the subagent. False positives are expected.

5. Present results

Resolve the review output directory (same pattern as siblings):

REVIEW_DATE=$(date +%Y-%m-%d)
REVIEW_DIR=".reviews/${REVIEW_DATE}"
if [ -d "$REVIEW_DIR" ]; then REVIEW_DIR=".reviews/${REVIEW_DATE}-$(date +%H%M)"; fi
~/.claude/scripts/ensure-gitignore.sh '.reviews/'
mkdir -p "$REVIEW_DIR"

Capture run metadata (see [Run metadata header](#run-metadata-header)) and prepend to ${REVIEW_DIR}/OBSERVABILITY-REVIEW.md.

Output structure:

1. Run metadata header
2. Telemetry overview (from step 2)
3. Findings table (grouped by signal: logging / metrics / tracing / correlation)
4. Recommended fix order

Present the report to the user.

---

Run metadata header

RUN_DATETIME=$(date -u +"%Y-%m-%d %H:%M UTC")
GIT_BRANCH=$(git rev-parse --abbrev-ref HEAD)
GIT_COMMIT=$(git rev-parse --short HEAD)
GIT_COMMIT_FULL=$(git rev-parse HEAD)
GIT_SUBJECT=$(git log -1 --pretty=%s)
# When scope is diff-based: BASE_REF=; BASE_COMMIT=$(git rev-parse --short "$BASE_REF")

> **Run:** {RUN_DATETIME}
> **Branch:** {GIT_BRANCH} @ {GIT_COMMIT} (`{GIT_COMMIT_FULL}`)
> **Subject:** {GIT_SUBJECT}
> **Base:** {BASE_REF} @ {BASE_COMMIT}   
> **Scope:** {scope description}

---

Finding link wrapping (PR mode)

When pr_url is provided (or gh pr view --json url -q .url 2>/dev/null returns one for standalone runs), wrap every path:line reference inside the finding tables as a Markdown link:

~/.claude/scripts/pr-deeplink.sh "$pr_url"  

The display text stays path:line. Pass L as the fourth argument for findings about removed code. Findings follow terse-comments: concrete fix, optional bug:/risk:/nit:/unsure: prefix.

---

Output Templates

Observability findings

| Priority | Signal | Finding | Impact | Effort | Tracked |
|----------|--------|---------|--------|--------|---------|
| P0 | tracing | Description with code references | Impact on debuggability / MTTR | trivial / small / moderate / large | — |
| P1 | metrics | Description with code references | Cardinality / cost impact | Effort estimate | TODO in file:line |

Signal column values: logging, metrics, tracing, correlation.

Re-evaluation table (for follow-up reviews)

| Finding | Status | What Changed |
|---------|--------|--------------|
| ~~1. Description~~ | FIXED | Brief explanation of the fix |
| 2. Description | Still applicable | No changes |

---

Guidelines

• Observability is about debuggability under failure. The bar is "could oncall figure out what broke at 3am from these signals alone?"
• Cardinality is cost. Flag high-cardinality labels (user IDs, request IDs, raw URLs) on Prometheus metrics; they're fine as log fields and span attributes.
• Search the organization's codebase for existing logger / tracer / metric patterns before recommending new ones.
• Include effort estimates.
• When the user asks for a follow-up review, find the most recent review directory and append a re-evaluation table.
• For detailed framework categories, see [reference.md](reference.md).
• REVIEW.md integration: If a REVIEW.md context section was provided by the review-all orchestrator (or exists at the repository root when running standalone), treat its rules as additional review criteria. "Always check" items are HIGH severity; domain-specific items (Observability section) are MEDIUM severity. "Skip" patterns exclude matching files from review scope.
• Findings must cite probed evidence (path:line, grep output, command result), not pattern-matched suspicion. Per ~/.claude/rules/probe-not-assume.md.

Source & license

This open-source skill is cataloged on AgentStack and links to its original source — we do not rehost the code.

• Author: paultyng
• Source: paultyng/skill-issue
• License: MIT

Install and usage instructions live in the source repository linked above.