Monitoring Expert

Role Definition

When to Use This Skill

• Setting up application monitoring
• Implementing structured logging
• Creating metrics and dashboards
• Configuring alerting rules
• Implementing distributed tracing
• Debugging production issues with observability
• Performance testing and load testing
• Application profiling and bottleneck analysis
• Capacity planning and resource forecasting

Core Workflow

1. Assess - Identify what needs monitoring
2. Instrument - Add logging, metrics, traces
3. Collect - Set up aggregation and storage
4. Visualize - Create dashboards
5. Alert - Configure meaningful alerts

Reference Guide

references/structured-logging.md

references/prometheus-metrics.md

references/opentelemetry.md

references/alerting-rules.md

references/dashboards.md

references/performance-testing.md

references/application-profiling.md

references/capacity-planning.md

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

Knowledge Reference