celticht32 Couchbase Observability
A skill for monitoring and alerting on Couchbase clusters in production — metrics, thresholds, Prometheus integration, Grafana dashboards, log aggregation, and health check patterns.
Distinct from:
couchbase-mcp— callingadmin_stats_*tools to read current statecouchbase-security-hardening— audit log configuration and shipping
When this skill applies
- "How do I monitor Couchbase?"
- "What metrics should I alert on?"
- "How do I integrate Couchbase with Prometheus / Grafana?"
- "What's a good alert threshold for memory / disk / replication lag?"
- "How do I know if a node is healthy?"
- "How do I aggregate Couchbase logs?"
- "How do I set up dashboards for Couchbase?"
- "What does the cache miss ratio tell me?"
- "How do I detect query performance degradation?"
Pick the right reference
| Question | Read |
|---|---|
| "What metrics matter and what do they mean?" | references/key-metrics.md |
| "Prometheus / Grafana setup — scraping, dashboards, recording rules" | references/prometheus-grafana.md |
| "Alert thresholds — what values should trigger pages vs warnings?" | references/alert-thresholds.md |
| "Log aggregation — shipping cluster logs to ELK / Splunk / Datadog" | references/log-aggregation.md |
Three core principles
Principle 1 — Alert on symptoms, not causes. "Disk usage > 80%" is a symptom. "Compaction not keeping up" is a cause. Alert on the symptom (disk), investigate causes during the incident. Symptom-based alerts have fewer false positives and fewer missed incidents.
Principle 2 — Baseline before you threshold. Couchbase metrics vary enormously by workload. A cache miss ratio of 20% is catastrophic for a key-value workload and perfectly acceptable for an analytics workload. Baseline your metrics for one week before setting alert thresholds.
Principle 3 — Every node matters. Couchbase is a distributed system. A single node with high memory pressure, disk usage, or replication lag can degrade the whole cluster. Aggregate cluster-level metrics for dashboards, but alert per-node on resource pressure.
Quick tool map
| Task | Tool |
|---|---|
| Cluster-level stats (ops/sec, memory, disk) | admin_stats_cluster |
| Per-node stats | admin_stats_nodes |
| Bucket-level stats | admin_stats_bucket |
| Index stats (GSI) | admin_stats_indexes |
| XDCR replication stats | admin_stats_xdcr |
| Query service stats | admin_stats_query |
| FTS / Search stats | admin_stats_fts |
| Eventing stats | admin_stats_eventing |
| Analytics stats | admin_stats_analytics |
| System events (cluster history) | admin_cluster_get_system_events |
| Prometheus scrape targets | admin_stats_prometheus_targets |
| Cluster logs | admin_cluster_get_logs |
Related skills
couchbase-mcp— theadmin_stats_*tools that expose the raw metric datacouchbase-security-hardening— audit log shipping (separate from operational log shipping)couchbase-xdcr— XDCR-specific metric interpretation (changes_left,docs_failed_cr_source)couchbase-eventing— Eventing-specific stats (dcp_backlog,failed_count,timeout_count)