Health Check

Observability health check

Read references/mcp.md first for the tool contract, the key scopes, and the 72h window. This skill is read-only and uses metadata tools only — no trace content, so no injection surface. If that file isn't present (this skill was lifted out on its own), ask the user for the plugin's references/mcp.md, or fall back to the hard rules: every tool is read-only, observation queries cap at a 72-hour window, and a Metadata-only key exposes 7 tools while a With-content key exposes all 9.

Run a fixed diagnostic sequence that turns "it's not working" into a specific cause, then report a short status checklist with the exact fix for anything red. Most signals are ambiguous alone — an empty trace list has several possible causes — so run the steps in order and interpret them together, each one narrowing the fault.

Workflow

1. Connection & key scope. Confirm the progress-observability MCP tools are available to you, then identify the scope by presence of the content tools: get_observation_details_with_content present = With-content key (9 tools); absent = Metadata-only key (7 tools). Report which scope is active and what it implies — e.g. eval-from-trace needs a With-content key to quote real examples. If the tools are missing or every call returns an auth error, the server didn't authenticate: the fix is OBSERVABILITY_MCP_API_KEY / the .mcp.json key, not the platform. (For a raw check outside the agent, the connectivity curl is in references/mcp.md.)

2. Recent data. list_observations, type: "traces", last 24h, small limit.

   • Non-empty — report the count, the services seen, and the most recent timestamp (freshness).
   • Empty at 24h — widen to the 72h max and retry. Present at 72h but not 24h means traffic is stale (nothing recent — the SDK stopped or the app went quiet).
   • Empty at 72h — no data. Separate the causes rather than guessing: no instrumentation running, the wrong key/project, or all traffic older than the 72h window.

3. Instrumentation depth. get_observation_details (metadata, include_children) on a couple of the most recent traces — it's available on both key scopes. Children with real span types (tool calls, retrieval, generations) is healthy. Traces with no children mean the SDK is capturing top-level spans only — flag it, since trace-triage and coverage-gaps will be blind to sub-spans.

   If the app uses a framework (LangChain, LlamaIndex, Haystack, CrewAI, LangGraph) but every trace is a bare LLM call with no workflow/task structure, name the most likely cause rather than just reporting thinness: in Python, the framework instrumentor is gated on a distribution name, so depending on langchain-core or llama-index-core without the langchain / llama-index meta package disables it silently. Measured: adding that one line took a fixture from 2 spans to 8, and another from 1 to 17. Suggest /instrument-agent to fix it.

4. Evaluations. list_evaluation_tasks, then get_evaluation_scores on a few. None configured is fine — but note that coverage-gaps and any eval monitoring need at least one judge, and offer generate-eval. Tasks that exist but have no recent scores are dormant (defined, not running).

5. Report a compact checklist — one line per check, a status marker, and for anything not green, the single concrete next step. Keep it scannable:

   ✓ Connection      reachable, auth OK
   ● Key scope       Metadata only (7 tools, no content tools) — eval-from-trace needs a With-content key
   ✓ Data freshness  312 traces / 24h, latest 4m ago, 3 services
   ● Instrumentation 2 of 5 sampled traces have no child spans — check SDK span nesting
   ✓ Evaluations     4 tasks, 3 scored in the last 24h
   

   End with the one highest-priority fix if anything is red, or a clear all-clear.

Never write back to the platform — the server is read-only.