Monitoring Expert Skill for Claude

Configures monitoring systems, implements structured logging pipelines, creates Prometheus/Grafana dashboards, defines alerting rules, and instruments distributed tracing. Implements Prometheus/Grafana stacks, conducts load testing, performs application profiling, and plans infrastructure capacity. Use when setting up application monitoring, adding observability to services, debugging production issues with logs/metrics/traces, running load tests with k6 or Artillery, profiling CPU/memory bottlenecks, or forecasting capacity needs.

11k tokens

context cost

the whole folder, loaded on every use

files

instructions only

copies elsewhere

how many repositories repackaged it

10860

stars on the repo

on the repository, not the skill itself

Install

one command, takes just this skill from the repository

npx skills add https://github.com/Jeffallan/claude-skills --skill monitoring-expert

The instruction itself

12 sections, as written by the author

Monitoring Expert

Observability and performance specialist implementing comprehensive monitoring, alerting, tracing, and performance testing systems.

Core Workflow

Assess — Identify what needs monitoring (SLIs, critical paths, business metrics)
Instrument — Add logging, metrics, and traces to the application (see examples below)
Collect — Configure aggregation and storage (Prometheus scrape, log shipper, OTLP endpoint); verify data arrives before proceeding
Visualize — Build dashboards using RED (Rate/Errors/Duration) or USE (Utilization/Saturation/Errors) methods
Alert — Define threshold and anomaly alerts on critical paths; validate no false-positive flood before shipping

Quick-Start Examples

Structured Logging (Node.js / Pino)

import pino from 'pino';

const logger = pino({ level: 'info' });

// Good — structured fields, includes correlation ID
logger.info({ requestId: req.id, userId: req.user.id, durationMs: elapsed }, 'order.created');

// Bad — string interpolation, no correlation
console.log(`Order created for user ${userId}`);

Prometheus Metrics (Node.js)

import { Counter, Histogram, register } from 'prom-client';

const httpRequests = new Counter({
  name: 'http_requests_total',
  help: 'Total HTTP requests',
  labelNames: ['method', 'route', 'status'],
});

const httpDuration = new Histogram({
  name: 'http_request_duration_seconds',
  help: 'HTTP request latency',
  labelNames: ['method', 'route'],
  buckets: [0.05, 0.1, 0.3, 0.5, 1, 2, 5],
});

// Instrument a route
app.use((req, res, next) => {
  const end = httpDuration.startTimer({ method: req.method, route: req.path });
  res.on('finish', () => {
    httpRequests.inc({ method: req.method, route: req.path, status: res.statusCode });
    end();
  });
  next();
});

// Expose scrape endpoint
app.get('/metrics', async (req, res) => {
  res.set('Content-Type', register.contentType);
  res.end(await register.metrics());
});

OpenTelemetry Tracing (Node.js)

import { NodeSDK } from '@opentelemetry/sdk-node';
import { OTLPTraceExporter } from '@opentelemetry/exporter-trace-otlp-http';
import { trace } from '@opentelemetry/api';

const sdk = new NodeSDK({
  traceExporter: new OTLPTraceExporter({ url: 'http://jaeger:4318/v1/traces' }),
});
sdk.start();

// Manual span around a critical operation
const tracer = trace.getTracer('order-service');
async function processOrder(orderId) {
  const span = tracer.startSpan('order.process');
  span.setAttribute('order.id', orderId);
  try {
    const result = await db.saveOrder(orderId);
    span.setStatus({ code: SpanStatusCode.OK });
    return result;
  } catch (err) {
    span.recordException(err);
    span.setStatus({ code: SpanStatusCode.ERROR });
    throw err;
  } finally {
    span.end();
  }
}

Prometheus Alerting Rule

groups:
  - name: api.rules
    rules:
      - alert: HighErrorRate
        expr: |
          rate(http_requests_total{status=~"5.."}[5m])
          / rate(http_requests_total[5m]) > 0.05
        for: 2m
        labels:
          severity: critical
        annotations:
          summary: "Error rate above 5% on {{ $labels.route }}"

k6 Load Test

import http from 'k6/http';
import { check, sleep } from 'k6';

export const options = {
  stages: [
    { duration: '1m', target: 50 },   // ramp up
    { duration: '5m', target: 50 },   // sustained load
    { duration: '1m', target: 0 },    // ramp down
  ],
  thresholds: {
    http_req_duration: ['p(95)<500'],  // 95th percentile < 500 ms
    http_req_failed:   ['rate<0.01'],  // error rate < 1%
  },
};

export default function () {
  const res = http.get('https://api.example.com/orders');
  check(res, { 'status is 200': (r) => r.status === 200 });
  sleep(1);
}

Reference Guide

Load detailed guidance based on context:

| Topic | Reference | Load When |

|-------|-----------|-----------|

| Logging | references/structured-logging.md | Pino, JSON logging |

| Metrics | references/prometheus-metrics.md | Counter, Histogram, Gauge |

| Tracing | references/opentelemetry.md | OpenTelemetry, spans |

| Alerting | references/alerting-rules.md | Prometheus alerts |

| Dashboards | references/dashboards.md | RED/USE method, Grafana |

| Performance Testing | references/performance-testing.md | Load testing, k6, Artillery, benchmarks |

| Profiling | references/application-profiling.md | CPU/memory profiling, bottlenecks |

| Capacity Planning | references/capacity-planning.md | Scaling, forecasting, budgets |

Constraints

MUST DO

Use structured logging (JSON)
Include request IDs for correlation
Set up alerts for critical paths
Monitor business metrics, not just technical
Use appropriate metric types (counter/gauge/histogram)
Implement health check endpoints

MUST NOT DO

Log sensitive data (passwords, tokens, PII)
Alert on every error (alert fatigue)
Use string interpolation in logs (use structured fields)
Skip correlation IDs in distributed systems

Documentation

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How to use it

Copy the folder

Take jeffallan/monitoring-expert from the repository into ~/.claude/skills for personal use, or into .claude/skills inside a project.

Check the name does not clash

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