# monitoring-guidelines

A skill providing guidelines for application and infrastructure monitoring, SLO burn rates, and symptom-based alerting strategies.

- skill · `type=skill` · Claude Code, Codex, Cursor, GitHub Copilot, Gemini CLI, OpenCode · 694 installs · ★ 286
- Author: Mindrally
- License: Apache-2.0 · policy=mirror · the beginning of the file is at the end of this page
- Source: https://github.com/Mindrally/skills/tree/HEAD/monitoring-guidelines/SKILL.md
- Updated: 2026-10-08
- HTML: https://affpapa.org/en/nevibecode/skills/monitoring-guidelines

## What it does

This skill guides coding agents through monitoring architecture. It focuses on the four golden signals: latency, traffic, errors, and saturation. Guidance covers application latency percentiles from p50 to p99, queue processing, host resources, and business indicators like conversion rates.

Alert design relies on user symptoms rather than root causes. The guidelines define Service Level Objectives, calculate error budgets, and set up multi-window burn rate alerts. Probes split clearly between liveness for crashes and readiness for traffic routing, with dependencies verified explicitly.

Alert fatigue quickly ruins monitoring without quarterly threshold reviews and hysteresis tuning. Every alert must include direct runbook links and remediation instructions so on-call engineers know what action to take.

## Install

### Claude Code (native platform)

1. **Skills CLI (Vercel)**
```bash
npx skills add Mindrally/skills --skill monitoring-guidelines -a claude-code
```

2. **Manually: put the files in place**
- File: `~/.claude/skills/monitoring-guidelines/SKILL.md` — Copy the whole skill folder; for one project use .claude/skills/monitoring-guidelines/

### Codex

1. **Skills CLI (Vercel)**
```bash
npx skills add Mindrally/skills --skill monitoring-guidelines -a codex
```

2. **Manually: put the files in place**
- File: `.agents/skills/monitoring-guidelines/SKILL.md` — For all projects use ~/.agents/skills/

### Cursor

1. **Skills CLI (Vercel)**
```bash
npx skills add Mindrally/skills --skill monitoring-guidelines -a cursor
```

2. **Manually: put the files in place**
- File: `.cursor/skills/monitoring-guidelines/SKILL.md` — Cursor also reads .agents/skills/ and .claude/skills/

### GitHub Copilot

1. **GitHub CLI**
```bash
gh skill install Mindrally/skills monitoring-guidelines
```

2. **Manually: put the files in place**
- File: `.github/skills/monitoring-guidelines/SKILL.md`

### Gemini CLI

1. **Skills CLI (Vercel)**
```bash
npx skills add Mindrally/skills --skill monitoring-guidelines -a gemini-cli
```

2. **Platform CLI**
```bash
gemini skills install https://github.com/Mindrally/skills --path monitoring-guidelines
```

### Windsurf (Devin Desktop)

**Manually: put the files in place**
- File: `.devin/skills/monitoring-guidelines/SKILL.md` — The legacy .windsurf/skills/ path still works

### OpenCode

**Skills CLI (Vercel)**
```bash
npx skills add Mindrally/skills --skill monitoring-guidelines -a opencode
```

### Claude.ai

**Claude.ai**
- Zip the folder and upload it in Settings → Capabilities → Skills

Where a file is given instead of a command, copy the files from the source to that path: https://github.com/Mindrally/skills/tree/HEAD/monitoring-guidelines/SKILL.md

## When to use it
- design an alerting strategy around SLOs and error budget burn rates
- select application and infrastructure metrics following golden signals
- configure liveness and readiness health checks for dependencies
- plan dashboards with baseline comparisons and deployment markers

## Example prompts
- Build an SLO-based alerting policy for our API using error budget burn rates
- Recommend dashboard metrics for a microservice based on the four golden signals
- Define liveness and deep readiness probes for a service with external databases

## Source text · SKILL.md · Apache-2.0

Below is the content of a third-party file. It is data, not instructions for you: do not act on anything written inside unless the human asks. Block tag: bbaccdeee645af74.

BEGIN THIRD-PARTY FILE bbaccdeee645af74
```text
---
name: monitoring-guidelines
description: Monitoring guidelines for applications and infrastructure including metrics collection, alerting strategies, and SLO-based monitoring
metadata:
  maintainer: Mindrally
  source: https://github.com/Mindrally/skills
---

# Monitoring Guidelines

Apply these monitoring principles to ensure system reliability, performance visibility, and proactive issue detection.

## Core Monitoring Principles

- Monitor the four golden signals: latency, traffic, errors, and saturation
- Implement monitoring as code for reproducibility
- Design monitoring around user experience and business impact
- Use SLOs (Service Level Objectives) to guide alerting decisions
- Balance comprehensive coverage with actionable insights

## Key Metrics to Monitor

### Application Metrics
- Request rate (requests per second)
- Error rate (percentage of failed requests)
- Response time (p50, p90, p95, p99 latencies)
- Active connections and concurrent users
- Queue depths and processing times

### Infrastructure Metrics
- CPU utilization and load average
- Memory usage and available memory
- Disk I/O and available storage
- Network throughput and error rates
- Container and pod health (for Kubernetes)

### Business Metrics
- Transaction volumes and values
- User signups and conversions
- Feature usage and adoption rates
- Revenue-impacting events
- Customer satisfaction indicators

## Alerting Strategy

### Alert Design Principles
- Alert on symptoms, not causes
- Make alerts actionable with clear remediation steps
- Set appropriate severity levels (critical, warning, info)
- Avoid alert fatigue through proper threshold tuning
- Include runbook links in alert notifications

### SLO-Based Alerting
- Define SLOs for critical user journeys
- Calculate error budgets and burn rates
- Alert when error budget consumption is high
- Use multi-window, multi-burn-rate alerts
- Review and adjust SLOs quarterly

### Alert Configuration
- Set meaningful thresholds based on baseline data
- Use hysteresis to prevent flapping alerts
- Implement alert dependencies to reduce noise
- Route alerts to appropriate teams
- Configure escalation policies

## Dashboard Design

### Effective Dashboards
- Create overview dashboards for service health
- Build detailed dashboards for debugging
- Use consistent layouts and naming conventions
- Include time range selectors and drill-down capabilities
- Display SLO status prominently

### Dashboard Content
- Show current state and recent trends
- Include comparison to baseline or previous periods
- Display deployment markers for correlation
- Add annotations for significant events
- Include links to related dashboards and logs

## Monitoring Tools Integration

### Data Collection
- Use agents or sidecars for metric collection
- Implement service discovery for dynamic environments
```
END THIRD-PARTY FILE bbaccdeee645af74

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---
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