# Monitoring

> Designs monitoring and alerting systems. Covers metric selection, dashboard design, alert rules, SLOs/SLIs, on-call runbooks, and observability architecture. Use when setting up monitoring, defining SLOs, creating dashboards, or improving alerting.

- **Type:** Skill
- **Install:** `agentstack add skill-pvnarp-agent-skills-monitoring`
- **Verified:** Yes — security-reviewed for prompt injection and unsafe behavior
- **Seller:** [pvnarp](https://agentstack.voostack.com/s/pvnarp)
- **Installs:** 0
- **Category:** [Cloud & Infrastructure](https://agentstack.voostack.com/c/cloud-infrastructure)
- **Latest version:** 0.1.0
- **License:** MIT
- **Upstream author:** [pvnarp](https://github.com/pvnarp)
- **Source:** https://github.com/pvnarp/agent-skills/tree/main/skills/monitoring

## Install

```sh
agentstack add skill-pvnarp-agent-skills-monitoring
```

Requires the [AgentStack CLI](https://agentstack.voostack.com/docs/cli). Works with Claude Code, Cursor, and any MCP-compatible agent.

## About

# Monitoring & Alerting

Monitor for user impact, not system internals. A server at 95% CPU is fine if users are happy. A server at 20% CPU is broken if requests are timing out.

## The Four Golden Signals

Monitor these for every service:

| Signal | What It Measures | Example Metric |
|--------|-----------------|----------------|
| **Latency** | How long requests take | p50, p95, p99 response time |
| **Traffic** | How much demand | Requests per second, concurrent users |
| **Errors** | How often things fail | Error rate (%), 5xx count |
| **Saturation** | How full the system is | CPU, memory, disk, queue depth, connection pool |

If you can only monitor four things, monitor these.

## SLOs, SLIs, SLAs

### SLI (Service Level Indicator)
A metric that measures a user-facing behavior.
```
SLI: Percentage of HTTP requests completing in  5 minutes

### When NOT to Alert
- CPU/memory/disk at a threshold (alert on user impact, not system state)
- A single transient error (wait for pattern)
- Something that can wait until business hours (use a ticket instead)
- A dashbaord already shows it (redundant noise)

### Alert Template
```
ALERT: [clear, specific name]
SEVERITY: critical / warning / info
CONDITION: [metric] [operator] [threshold] for [duration]
IMPACT: [what users experience]
RUNBOOK: [link to resolution steps]
ESCALATION: [who to contact if not resolved in X minutes]
```

### Alert Rules
1. **Every alert must be actionable.** If the response is "wait and see," it's not an alert.
2. **Every alert needs a runbook.** No one remembers what to do at 3 AM.
3. **Review alerts monthly.** Delete alerts that fire but require no action (noise).
4. **Page on symptoms, ticket on causes.** "Requests failing" is a page. "Disk at 80%" is a ticket.

## Metric Naming Convention

```
...

# Examples
api.http.request_duration.milliseconds
api.http.requests.total
api.database.query_duration.milliseconds
api.database.connections.active
worker.jobs.processed.total
worker.jobs.failed.total
worker.queue.depth.count
```

## Common Monitoring Stack

| Need | Tools |
|------|-------|
| Metrics | Prometheus, Datadog, CloudWatch, Grafana |
| Logs | Loki, ELK, CloudWatch Logs, Datadog Logs |
| Traces | Jaeger, Zipkin, Datadog APM, Honeycomb |
| Alerts | PagerDuty, OpsGenie, Grafana Alerting |
| Uptime | Pingdom, UptimeRobot, Checkly |
| Dashboards | Grafana, Datadog, CloudWatch |

> Reference: `reference/alerting-patterns.md` - golden signals by service type, severity levels, alert fatigue prevention, SLO/SLI templates, dashboard layouts, PromQL patterns, escalation decision tree.

## Monitoring Maturity Checklist

### Level 1: Basic
- [ ] Health check endpoint exists and is monitored
- [ ] Error rate tracked and alerted on
- [ ] Basic uptime monitoring (is it responding?)

### Level 2: Operational
- [ ] Four golden signals dashboarded per service
- [ ] Alerts have runbooks
- [ ] Deploy markers on graphs
- [ ] Log aggregation searchable

### Level 3: SLO-Driven
- [ ] SLOs defined for user-facing services
- [ ] Error budget tracking and burn rate alerts
- [ ] Distributed tracing for request flow
- [ ] Alert noise reviewed and reduced monthly

### Level 4: Proactive
- [ ] Anomaly detection on key metrics
- [ ] Capacity planning based on traffic trends
- [ ] Chaos testing validates monitoring coverage
- [ ] On-call load balanced and sustainable

## Source & license

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

- **Author:** [pvnarp](https://github.com/pvnarp)
- **Source:** [pvnarp/agent-skills](https://github.com/pvnarp/agent-skills)
- **License:** MIT

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

## Pricing

- **Free** — Free

## Security capabilities

Automated source analysis of v0.1.0 — what this tool can access:

- **Network access:** no
- **Filesystem access:** no
- **Shell / process execution:** no
- **Environment & secrets:** no
- **Dynamic code execution:** no

*"Yes" means the capability is present in the source — more access means more to trust, not that it is unsafe.*


## Versions

- **0.1.0** — security scan: passed — Imported from the upstream source.

## Links

- Listing page: https://agentstack.voostack.com/l/skill-pvnarp-agent-skills-monitoring
- Seller: https://agentstack.voostack.com/s/pvnarp
- Browse the marketplace: https://agentstack.voostack.com/browse

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Listed on AgentStack — the marketplace for AI agent skills and MCP servers. Every listing is security-reviewed. Creators keep 70%.