Monitoring and alerting

Skill tspry/superpowers-devops/skills/monitoring-and-alerting

Use when setting up or debugging Prometheus, Grafana, logging, or alertingFrom its SKILL.md

Install

npx -y skills add tspry/superpowers-devops --skill monitoring-and-alerting

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One thing to look at

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SKILL.md

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Monitoring & Alerting

Mode Detection

Repo mode — templates in tooling/monitoring/. Scaffold scrape configs, dashboards, alert rules.
Chat mode — user pastes metrics, alert config, or dashboard JSON. Review and suggest fixes.

Prometheus

Key concepts

Scrape config — defines where Prometheus pulls metrics from
Alert rules — conditions that trigger alerts
Recording rules — precomputed expensive queries

Useful PromQL queries

# CPU usage by pod
rate(container_cpu_usage_seconds_total[5m])

# Memory usage
container_memory_working_set_bytes / container_spec_memory_limit_bytes

# HTTP error rate
rate(http_requests_total{status=~"5.."}[5m]) / rate(http_requests_total[5m])

# Pod restarts
increase(kube_pod_container_status_restarts_total[1h])

Alerting rules example

groups:
  - name: app-alerts
    rules:
      - alert: HighErrorRate
        expr: rate(http_requests_total{status=~"5.."}[5m]) > 0.05
        for: 5m
        labels:
          severity: critical
        annotations:
          summary: "High error rate on {{ $labels.service }}"

Grafana

Debugging dashboards

Check data source connection: Configuration → Data Sources → Test
Check query in Explore tab before adding to panel
Check time range — many "missing data" issues are time range mismatches

Logging

What good logs look like

{
  "timestamp": "2026-04-01T10:00:00Z",
  "level": "error",
  "message": "Database connection failed",
  "service": "api",
  "trace_id": "abc123",
  "error": "connection refused"
}

Log querying

# Kubernetes logs
kubectl logs -l app=myapp --since=1h
kubectl logs -l app=myapp --tail=100

# Journald
journalctl -u myservice -f
journalctl -u myservice --since "1 hour ago"

Tooling Templates

tooling/monitoring/prometheus/ — scrape configs, alert rules
tooling/monitoring/grafana/ — dashboard JSONs
tooling/monitoring/starters/ — full observability stack