API Observability Planner

API Observability Planner Protocol

This skill ensures that when an API goes down, the team knows exactly why before the users even notice. It shifts telemetry from "just log the errors" to a structured observability pipeline.

Core assumption: If you can't measure it, you can't manage it. Blind APIs cause prolonged outages.

1. The Three Pillars Strategy (Static)

Define exactly what your framework will emit:

• Logs (Events): Structured JSON logging. Never use raw text strings ("User 123 failed login" vs {"event": "login_failed", "user_id": 123, "reason": "bad_password"}).
• Metrics (Aggregations): Implement the RED Method:
  • Rate: Requests per second.
  • Errors: Failed request rate (4xx vs 5xx).
  • Duration: Latency percentiles (p50, p90, p99).
• Traces (Workflows): Distributed tracing (W3C Trace Context). Ensure trace_id and span_id propagate across microservices and database calls.

2. Health & Alerting Design

Define what constitutes "Healthy" and when pagers should go off.

• Deep Health Checks: /healthz shouldn't just return 200 OK. It should verify DB connection, Redis reachability, and critical downstreams.
• Alert Rules:
  • Warning: p99 latency > 500ms for 5 minutes.
  • Critical: 5xx error rate > 5% for 2 minutes.

3. Output Generation

Required Outputs (Must write BOTH to docs/api-report/):

1. Human-Readable Markdown (docs/api-report/api-observability-report.md)

### 🔭 API Observability Blueprint

**Instrumentation Strategy:** OpenTelemetry (OTel)
**Log Format:** Structured JSON

#### 📊 Core Metrics (RED Method)
1. **Rate:** Tracked via Prometheus `http_requests_total`.
2. **Errors:** Alerting on HTTP 500-599. (4xx are client problems, track but don't wake up on-call).
3. **Duration:** Tracked via `http_request_duration_seconds` (Buckets: 50ms, 100ms, 500ms, 1s, 5s).

#### 🚨 Alert Configuration (PagerDuty / Slack)
- **High Severity:** Order Creation 5xx Rate > 1% over 5m.
- **Low Severity:** Database Disk Space < 20%.

#### 🆔 Tracing Propagation
Inject `traceparent` and `tracestate` headers into all outgoing upstream HTTP/gRPC requests.

2. Machine-Readable JSON (docs/api-report/api-observability-output.json)

{
  "skill": "api-observability-planner",
  "framework": "OpenTelemetry",
  "metrics": {
    "latency_thresholds_ms": {"p95": 200, "p99": 500}
  },
  "alerts": [
    {"name": "High 5xx Rate", "condition": "error_rate > 1%", "duration": "5m", "severity": "High"}
  ]
}

Guardrails

• Log Forging / Injection: Ensure log sanitization is implemented to prevent multiline log spoofing.
• PII in Logs: Explicitly call out that passwords, tokens, credit_cards, and emails must be masked or scrubbed before being written to stdout or log aggregators.