logging-monitoring

When to use

Use when answering "what does this project actually have" for observability: which required signal exists, what implements it, and what evidence says so. Also when adding logging or wiring a monitoring stack — but the posture question comes first, because you cannot add the missing signal until you know which one is missing.

Do NOT use when:

• Classifying an alert or writing a runbook (use alerting-doctrine)
• Adjudicating a go/no-go readiness verdict (use operational-readiness)
• Creating Grafana dashboards or queries (use grafana)
• Dashboard layout and visualization decisions (use dashboard-design)
• Hardening the host itself (use server-hardening)

Golden Signals

Four signals. The family is named in many places; these are the definitions. A posture report covers all four or records why it cannot — never four minus the inconvenient ones.

Golden Signal: Latency

Measures how long a served request takes, split by outcome — successful and failed latency are different distributions, and averaging them hides both. Read it as percentiles (p50 / p95 / p99), never as a mean.

A missing one costs the ability to see degradation that is not yet an outage. The system is up, users are leaving, and every error-rate panel is green.

Typical detection paths — APM transaction traces, a request-duration histogram, reverse-proxy or load-balancer access logs, a middleware timer.

Golden Signal: Traffic

Measures demand on the system — requests per second, jobs enqueued, messages consumed, active sessions. The denominator every other signal needs.

A missing one costs all interpretation of the other three. Errors doubling is meaningless without knowing whether traffic doubled; a quiet incident and a quiet Sunday are indistinguishable.

Typical detection paths — a request counter, access-log volume, queue depth and enqueue rate, a CDN or gateway request metric.

Golden Signal: Errors

Measures the rate of requests that failed — explicitly (a 5xx, a raised exception, a dead-lettered job) or implicitly (a 200 carrying a wrong body, a policy-violating success). Rate, not count.

A missing one costs the ability to distinguish a broken deploy from a slow one, and it is the signal most often mistaken for complete because an error-tracking SDK is installed. An exception tracker is not an error rate: it sees raised exceptions, not handled failures or wrong answers.

Typical detection paths — error-tracking SDK events, HTTP status distribution, dead-letter queue depth, log-level counts at error and above.

Golden Signal: Saturation

Measures how full the constrained resource is — the one that runs out first. Connection pool, worker slots, disk, memory, file descriptors, a third-party rate-limit budget. Expressed against its ceiling, which means the ceiling has to be known.

A missing one costs every early warning. Saturation is the only one of the four that is predictive: latency, traffic and errors report what already happened, saturation reports what is about to. It is also the signal most often absent entirely — see scale-discipline R-A12, which asks the finite-resource question at review time.

Typical detection paths — pool-utilisation gauges, queue wait time (not depth), host memory and disk metrics, rate-limit headers from an upstream provider.

Evidence states — a threshold carries its provenance

A number in a posture report is only as good as where it came from, and the failure this prevents is an agent-suggested SLO becoming a commitment nobody made. Provenance is part of the value, not a footnote.

Provenance	Meaning	May be rendered as operational
measured	Observed in running telemetry	Yes
committed	Stated in a doc, contract or SLA, not yet verified	Yes, marked unverified
proposed	The agent suggested it	Never
unknown	Inspection could not establish a result	Never

A proposed threshold stays proposed through every rendering. There is no promotion path — not "it looks right", not "the user did not object". Promotion requires a measurement or a stated commitment, which changes the provenance first and the rendering second.

Two absences that are not the same thing, and collapsing them is how a gap becomes invisible:

• unavailable — affirmatively established that the project cannot supply this signal. Requires a non-empty reason. A recorded null.
• unknown — nobody looked, or the look was inconclusive. Never counts as compliant, never counts as green, and is not a null — it is unfinished work.

Reported signal count equals four minus the recorded unavailable nulls. unknown reduces nothing; it is an open question.

Procedure: Establish the observability posture

1. Take the four signals as the requirement. Latency, traffic, errors, saturation. The list does not shrink to what the project happens to have.
2. Detect what implements each one. Read the project rather than assuming a stack: the logging config (config/logging.php in Laravel, LOGGING in Django, winston/pino config in Node, config/environments in Rails), then the metrics and APM wiring, then the dashboards and alert rules that already exist. An installed SDK is evidence of a capability, never of a signal — a Sentry integration does not give you latency percentiles.
3. Attach evidence to every claim. One concrete artefact per signal — file:line, a dashboard panel, a metric name, a config key. A signal with no artefact is unknown, not present.
4. Record what is genuinely absent as unavailable plus a reason. "No APM configured, so no request-duration distribution exists" is a null. Silence is not.
5. Mark every threshold's provenance per the table above, before the report is rendered rather than after.
6. Hand the normalized result on. alerting-doctrine consumes it to decide what earns a page; operational-readiness consumes it as one input to a go/no-go verdict. Neither re-derives it.

Validate

• Verify all four signals appear in the report — present, unavailable with a reason, or unknown. Four rows, always.
• Confirm every present signal cites a concrete artefact, not a stack guess.
• Confirm no proposed or unknown threshold is rendered as operational.
• Confirm unavailable rows carry a non-empty reason.
• Verify log level matches severity (no error for handled conditions).
• Confirm structured context is passed (not string interpolation).
• Check that no sensitive data (passwords, tokens, PII) appears in log output.

Output format

1. A four-row signal table — signal, status, implementation, evidence artefact.
2. Any threshold with its provenance marked.
3. The unavailable nulls with their reasons, and the unknown rows as open questions.

Examples

Contract fixtures. Each pair differs only in the condition under test, and each case states the verdict it must produce. These are contract evidence for review, not an executable suite — no parser or runner reads them.

Missing signal — malformed vs clean

# malformed — logs and error tracking, no saturation anywhere.
# Scored as missing a signal, NOT as observable.
signals:
  latency:    { status: present, evidence: "APM: http.server.duration p95" }
  traffic:    { status: present, evidence: "nginx access log rate" }
  errors:     { status: present, evidence: "error-tracker project 41" }
# saturation omitted entirely
verdict: "missing-signal: saturation"
reason: "no pool, memory, disk or rate-limit utilisation metric detected"

# clean — the same project with the one signal supplied.
signals:
  latency:    { status: present, evidence: "APM: http.server.duration p95" }
  traffic:    { status: present, evidence: "nginx access log rate" }
  errors:     { status: present, evidence: "error-tracker project 41" }
  saturation: { status: present, evidence: "db_pool_in_use / db_pool_size gauge" }
verdict: all-signals-detected

Provenance — malformed vs clean

# malformed — an agent-suggested number rendered as a commitment.
slo:
  name: checkout_availability
  threshold: 99.9
  provenance: proposed
  operational: true      # <- promotion with no measurement and no commitment
verdict: invalid-provenance

# clean — the suggestion stays a suggestion.
slo:
  name: checkout_availability
  threshold: 99.9
  provenance: proposed
  operational: false
verdict: valid-proposed-threshold

Unavailable signal — malformed vs clean

# malformed — a null with no reason is a silently dropped gap.
signals:
  saturation: { status: unavailable }
verdict: invalid-unavailable-signal

# clean — the null carries why.
signals:
  saturation:
    status: unavailable
    reason: "managed runtime exposes no pool or host metrics on this plan"
verdict: valid-unavailable-signal

Detected implementation — stack-specific evidence

Reached after detection, never before it. These are what a detected implementation looks like in one common stack; the neutral model above is what you reason from. Deep vendor material lives in the specialists, which this skill points at rather than absorbing.

Tool	Signal it can carry	Reached by
Error tracker (Sentry)	errors (raised only)	sentry-integration
Grafana	any, if the metric exists	grafana, dashboard-design
Loki	errors and traffic via log volume	grafana
Slack webhook	none — a delivery channel	alerting-doctrine

A delivery channel is not a signal. Slack carrying error-level messages tells you notifications work, not that an error rate exists.

A channel layout repeats across stacks whatever names it uses: a rotating file channel, an error-alert channel, an aggregation channel, and a composite that deliberately excludes the alert leg so a noisy job cannot page anyone. Aggregation labels carry app, service and environment; the service label is what separates log types in a query, and a workload needing its own labels gets its own scoped channel rather than a shared one. Which categories reach which channel is gated by config flags, not by call sites — so read the flags before concluding a category is unlogged.

→ Log levels, structured context, what to log, and error-tracker patterns: guideline php/logging.md.

Gotcha

• An installed SDK is a capability, not a signal — the commonest false green.
• Queue depth is a traffic signal; queue wait time is the saturation one.
• Saturation needs a ceiling. A utilisation number with no known limit is unknown, not present.
• Error trackers see raised exceptions, not handled failures or wrong answers.
• Sentry has a 200KB event size limit — large context gets truncated.
• Structured logging keys must be snake_case.
• Don't create a log channel without the query or dashboard that reads it.

Do NOT

• Do NOT report three signals because the fourth was inconvenient — record it as unavailable with a reason, or as unknown.
• Do NOT render a proposed or unknown threshold as operational.
• Do NOT treat unknown as green, compliant, or "probably fine".
• Do NOT infer a signal from an installed dependency.
• Do NOT interpolate variables into log messages — use a context array.
• Do NOT log at error level for expected, handled conditions.

Auto-trigger keywords

• logging
• monitoring
• observability
• Golden Signals
• SLI
• SLO
• structured logging
• log levels