Maverick Observability Best Practices

What it does

This skill defines actionable observability standards for deployed services. It guides instrumenting metrics (RED/USE), implementing distributed tracing with OpenTelemetry, exposing liveness/readiness checks, and defining SLIs/SLOs and dashboard panels. Use it to design or review operational observability for services in a microservices or monolith environment.

When to use it

Use this skill when creating or reviewing service instrumentation, building dashboards, or setting SLOs. It's appropriate during design, code review, and oncall runbooks to ensure metrics, traces and health checks are implemented coherently.

What's included

• Scripts: none declared in repo metadata
• References: none declared in repo metadata
• Instructions: Detailed guidance on metric naming, RED/USE approaches, sampling and propagation for traces, health check semantics (liveness/readiness/startup), SLI/SLO definitions and dashboard principles. Includes patterns to detect observability issues in code review.

Compatible agents

Best used by agents with code-review and DevOps capabilities (agents that can read repo files and suggest instrumentation), and those that can run or suggest OpenTelemetry/prometheus/Grafana configurations.