observe

Activate When

• /godmode:observe, "add monitoring", "set up logging"
• "create alerts", "define SLOs", "build dashboard"
• Shipping without observability instrumentation
• "prometheus", "metrics", "observability stack", "monitoring metrics"

Workflow

1. Assessment

| Pillar | Status | Coverage | Tools |
| Metrics | PARTIAL | 40% | Prometheus |
| Logging | BASIC | 60% | stdout |
| Tracing | NONE | 0% | — |
| Alerting | MINIMAL | 20% | PagerDuty |

# Detect observability libraries
grep -rE "prom-client|datadog|opentelemetry" \
  package.json requirements.txt 2>/dev/null

2. Metrics (RED + USE methods)

RED (request-driven):
  http_requests_total (counter: method, path, status)
  http_request_duration_sec (histogram: method, path)
  http_requests_in_flight (gauge)
USE (infrastructure):
  CPU, memory, disk, network, connections
Business:
  user_signups_total, orders_completed_total,
  payment_failures_total, active_sessions

IF cardinality > 10K labels: remove high-cardinality (user_id, request_id go in logs, not metrics).

3. Structured Logging

{
  "timestamp": "2025-01-15T10:30:45Z",
  "level": "info",
  "service": "api-gateway",
  "trace_id": "abc123",
  "request_id": "req-456",
  "message": "request completed",
  "duration_ms": 45
}

| Level | When | Alert? |
| FATAL | Cannot continue | Page on-call |
| ERROR | Operation failed | Alert channel |
| WARN | Unexpected but handled | Track trend |
| INFO | Business events | No |
| DEBUG | Diagnostic (dev only) | No |

NEVER log PII, tokens, passwords, or credit cards. ALWAYS include request_id in every log entry.

4. Distributed Tracing

OpenTelemetry setup (recommended):
  Auto-instrument: HTTP, DB, Redis, gRPC
  Propagate: trace_id across all service calls
  Backend: Jaeger|Tempo|Zipkin|Datadog

IF sampling rate too low (< 1%): miss rare errors. IF 100% sampling: too expensive at scale. Default: 10% sampling, 100% for errors.

5. SLO/SLI Definition

| SLI | Target | Window | Error Budget |
| Availability | 99.9% | 30d | 43.2 min |
| Latency p99 | < 500ms | 30d | 0.1% slow |
| Error rate | < 0.1% | 30d | budget: 0.1% |

Burn rate alerts: Fast: 14.4x over 1h (consumes 2% budget) Slow: 6x over 6h (consumes 5% budget)

6. Alert Rules

| Alert | Condition | Severity |
| HighErrorRate | 5xx > 1% for 5m | Critical |
| HighLatencyP99 | p99 > 2s for 5m | Critical |
| DiskSpaceLow | usage > 85% | Warning |
| PodCrashLoop | restarts > 3/5m | Critical |

EVERY alert MUST have for duration (min 2m critical, 5m warning). No flapping alerts.

7. Dashboard (Four Golden Signals)

Row 1: Request Rate, Error Rate, Latency, Saturation
Row 2: SLO status, error budget remaining
Row 3: Per-service breakdown
Row 4: Infrastructure (CPU, memory, disk, network)

Hard Rules

1. NEVER ship without metrics + structured logging.
2. NEVER console.log/print in production.
3. NEVER high-cardinality in metric labels.
4. NEVER alert without for duration.
5. NEVER log PII/tokens/passwords.
6. ALWAYS include request_id in every log.
7. ALWAYS verify endpoints reachable before done.

TSV Logging

Append .godmode/observe-results.tsv:

timestamp	pillar	tool	items_configured	coverage_pct	status

Keep/Discard

KEEP if: pillar produces verified output AND
  latency increase < 5%.
DISCARD if: no output OR perf degrades > 5%
  OR cardinality explosion.

Stop Conditions

STOP when FIRST of:
  - All 3 pillars verified (metrics/logs/traces)
  - SLOs defined + alerts configured
  - User requests stop

Autonomous Operation

On failure: git reset --hard HEAD~1. Never pause.

Error Recovery

Failure	Action
Cardinality explosion	Remove labels, use histograms
Missing trace spans	Check sampling, propagation
Alert fatigue	Tune thresholds, add for: duration
Log volume exceeds budget	Drop DEBUG, sample paths