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Service Mesh Observability

Guides the agent to set up tracing, metrics, dashboards and SLOs for Istio or Linkerd service meshes.

Source Download skill
Repository
wshobson/agents
Stars
42,095
Licence
MIT
Files
2 files

What it does

Once installed, the agent follows a structured guide for monitoring the traffic between microservices in a service mesh such as Istio or Linkerd. It explains the three pillars of observability (metrics, traces and logs), the golden signals to alert on (latency, traffic, errors, saturation), and best practices like sampling rates and avoiding high-cardinality labels. For detailed templates and worked examples, it reads an additional reference file.

Great for

  • Platform or SRE engineers setting up monitoring for a service mesh
  • Developers debugging latency or error issues between services
  • Teams defining SLOs for service-to-service communication

Skip it if

  • Single applications not running in a service mesh, since the guidance targets mesh-specific tooling (the skill itself is conceptual and general)
  • Anyone expecting it to configure a live cluster automatically; the files contain guidance and templates, not an executable setup tool

Try asking

  • “Help me set up distributed tracing for our Istio mesh”
  • “What alert thresholds should I use for golden signals on Linkerd?”
  • “Design a Grafana dashboard to visualise dependencies between our services”
  • “Our checkout service has rising P99 latency, how should I debug it through the mesh?”
Step-by-step guide: how to use Service Mesh ObservabilityInstall, first run, examples, tips and FAQs

Install in 3 steps

  1. 1

    Download the skill

    The ZIP contains the 2 original files, the MIT licence and an attribution note.

    service-mesh-observability.zip
  2. 2

    Add it to your agent

    Claude Code (all projects)

    mkdir -p ~/.claude/skills && unzip service-mesh-observability.zip -d ~/.claude/skills/

    Claude Code / Agent SDK (this project only)

    mkdir -p .claude/skills && unzip service-mesh-observability.zip -d .claude/skills/

    Claude apps (web/desktop): Settings → Capabilities → Skills → Upload skill, and choose the ZIP.

  3. 3

    Ask for the task

    No special command needed — the agent reads the skill's description and loads it when your request matches. Try one of the prompts above.

Get better results

  • Name your mesh (Istio or Linkerd) and your monitoring stack in the request so the agent picks the right templates.
  • Check the generated templates against your cluster's versions and real metric names before applying them.
  • Ask for sampling and cardinality advice together with the setup, since the guidance warns about storage cost.

What's inside

  • references/details.md
  • SKILL.md

Redistributed unmodified from wshobson/agents under the MIT licence. The assessment was drafted with AI from the skill's files on 2026-10-29. Skills can instruct your agent to run code — read SKILL.md and any scripts before installing.