Debug

Debug (Log → Trace → Metrics)

Overview

This skill is for debugging with existing telemetry. It does not focus on adding instrumentation (use observability when telemetry gaps block triage).

Goal: turn “something is broken/slow” into:

• a concrete symptom + impact statement,
• an evidence-backed hypothesis (or a small set of competing ones),
• a mitigation (rollback/flag/scale) when needed,
• a short list of fix + follow-up tasks.

Inputs / Outputs

Inputs: Symptom description (what's failing/slow); access to logs, traces, and metrics; environment and time window. Outputs: Root cause diagnosis with evidence, mitigation action, fix plan, learning capture. Feeds follow-ups to observability, resilience, platform, or architecture.

Workflow

0) Establish ground truth (2–5 minutes)

Capture:

• Environment (local/dev/staging/prod) and time window (start/end).
• Symptom (what’s failing/slow) and impact (SLO/user-visible blast radius).
• One exemplar: request/trace ID, job run ID, message ID, or timestamped log line.

1) Logs (find the exemplar and its correlation IDs)

1. Find the first error/timeout log line closest to the symptom window.
2. Identify correlation keys (prefer stable IDs):
   • traceId, requestId, spanId
   • op (route template / RPC method / job name / message type)
   • error code/type (typed error envelope, gRPC status, HTTP status)
3. Pull the full log story for the exemplar (start → downstream call(s) → failure).

Copy/paste helpers live in references/commands.md.

2) Trace (turn the exemplar into a dependency hypothesis)

If you have a traceId, use it.

1. Open the trace and confirm the root span matches the suspected operation (op).
2. Identify:
   • the slowest span(s),
   • the first error span(s),
   • retries (multiple similar child spans),
   • deadline/time budget signals (deadline exceeded, timeout errors).
3. Convert that to a dependency statement:
   • “service A is timing out calling service B method X”
   • “DB query Y is slow / missing index / deadlocked”
   • “Queue consumer is failing on message type T (poison message)”

If you cannot find/interpret traces, fall back to logs + metrics and consider adding missing telemetry via observability.

3) Metrics (confirm blast radius + regression)

Use metrics to answer:

• Is this widespread or isolated to one tenant/route/method?
• Is it a new regression (deploy-correlated) or a gradual degradation (resource/saturation)?
• Is it primarily errors or latency?

Start with RED for the boundary (HTTP route / gRPC method / consumer group).

4) Map failure propagation (technical + organizational)

• If this component degrades, what fails next?
• What is likely failing silently (data drift, dropped work, partial writes, stale reads)?
• What is the organizational cascade (handoff queue, approvals, unclear ownership)?

GATE: Failure propagation (step 4) must be mapped before deciding mitigate vs investigate. If you don't know what breaks next, you can't assess the urgency of mitigation.

5) Decide: mitigate vs investigate

If impact is high and evidence points to a recent change:

• rollback / disable flag / reduce load / scale critical dependency

If impact is moderate or unclear:

• tighten the hypothesis with 1–2 targeted checks (another exemplar trace, compare two instances, check downstream health)

6) Capture learnings (don’t lose the fix)

If you found a systemic gap, capture it:

• missing telemetry field contracts → observability
• retries without idempotency / missing time budgets → resilience
• repeated boundary logic across services → platform
• cross-service pattern confusion → architecture

Minimum viable execution

When context or time is constrained, these are the load-bearing steps:

1. Establish ground truth (step 0) — environment, symptom, one exemplar.
2. Follow log → trace → metrics (steps 1-3) — this sequence, in this order.
3. Map failure propagation (step 4) — what breaks next, what breaks silently.
4. Capture learning (step 6) — don't lose the fix; route to the right skill.

Steps that can be cut under pressure: detailed metric blast-radius analysis (step 3 depth), organizational cascade mapping (step 4 breadth).

Guardrails

• Don’t log secrets/PII while triaging (even “temporarily”).
• Don’t use unbounded IDs as metric labels; use logs/traces for per-entity investigation.
• Don’t add retries as a debugging “fix” without idempotency/dedupe.
• Prefer a small number of exemplars (2–3) over “grep everything forever”.

Common failure modes

• Jumps straight to reading code instead of following log → trace → metrics — this skips the evidence and leads to hypothesis-driven debugging without data.
• Skips blast radius assessment (step 3-4) — fixes the symptom without knowing what else is affected or failing silently.
• Fixes the immediate symptom without capturing learning (step 6) — the same failure recurs because the systemic gap is never routed to the right skill.
• Checks only one exemplar and generalizes — different exemplars often reveal different failure modes.

References

• Copy/paste commands: references/commands.md
• Scenario checklists (HTTP/gRPC/consumers): references/scenarios.md
• Retrospective / Postmortem template: ../references/structured-thinking-templates.md
• If telemetry is missing: observability

Output Template

When using this skill, return:

• Symptom: what is failing/slow (include concrete ops: route/method/job/message type).
• Impact: who/what is affected and how badly (errors %, latency p95, backlog size).
• Time window: start/end and whether it correlates with deploy/config change.
• Evidence: exemplar IDs + the key log/trace/metric observations.
• Hypothesis: most likely cause + 1 alternative (if applicable).
• Failure propagation: what breaks next, what breaks silently, organizational cascade points.
• Mitigation: what you did / recommend doing now (rollback/flag/scale).
• Fix plan: code/config changes to make it correct and durable.
• Follow-ups: telemetry gaps, runbook updates, tests, new invariants.
  • If root cause is systemic, flag for a follow-up retrospective (../references/structured-thinking-templates.md — Retrospective / Postmortem).

Converted and distributed by TomeVault — claim your Tome and manage your conversions.