# Monitoring Conventions

> Alert on symptoms, prevent alert fatigue, link runbooks, and separate health from readiness checks. Use when editing infrastructure code (CDK, Terraform, serverless config, CI workflows) or adding metrics and alerts.

- Skill: `msolecki/monitoring-conventions` (Agent Skill)
- Install (CLI): `npx get-skill add msolecki/monitoring-conventions`
- Raw SKILL.md: https://api.skillmd.com/api/skills/msolecki/monitoring-conventions/raw
- Safety review: pending
- Works with: Claude Code, Claude.ai, OpenAI Codex
- Category: DevOps & Infra
- License: MIT
- Author: msolecki (https://skillmd.com/u/msolecki)
- Updated: 2026-11-14
- Page: https://skillmd.com/skills/msolecki/monitoring-conventions

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# Monitoring and alerting rules

- Alert on SYMPTOMS such as error rate above 1%, p99 above 2 seconds, or a growing queue; do not page on causes such as CPU above 80% or memory use. Causes belong on dashboards.
- Prevent alert fatigue. If an alert fires three times without action, tune its threshold or remove it. An ignored alert is worse than no alert.
- Every paging alert links to a runbook that says what to inspect, what to restart, and whom to escalate to. Do not add an alert without a runbook.
- Separate `/health` for process liveness and load balancers from `/ready` for dependency readiness and orchestration. A health check does not query the database.
- Add a new metric or alert in the same change as the feature it observes. Do not defer monitoring to an unspecified later task.