Factory Obs

Factory Observability

Launch, stop, reset, or inspect the local Docker observability stack — a 5-service stack (OTel Collector + Loki + Prometheus + Grafana + Grafana Image Renderer) that ingests .factory/logs/events-*.jsonl into Loki and Claude Code's native OTel metrics into Prometheus, and surfaces the data in 7 preconfigured Grafana dashboards.

The stack can watch multiple factory projects at once. Each project is registered explicitly via a user-level registry at ~/.config/vsdd-factory/watched-factories. factory-obs up generates a docker-compose.override.yml from that registry with one bind mount per factory (each at /var/log/factory/<safe-name>/), and the collector globs /var/log/factory/*/events-*.jsonl so every registered factory feeds the same Loki.

The stack is entirely local and opt-in — nothing is emitted off-box. If Docker isn't running or isn't installed, the skill surfaces the error and stops; it never attempts to fall back to cloud services.

Announce at Start

Before any other action, say verbatim:

I'm using the factory-obs skill to manage the local observability stack.

Arguments

The skill accepts one positional argument matching the factory-obs subcommand. If no argument is given, default to up and then print the Grafana URL.

Execute

Run the factory-obs binary with the requested subcommand:

"${CLAUDE_PLUGIN_ROOT}/bin/factory-obs" "${ARG:-up}"

If the user asked for up (or defaulted), also surface the Grafana URL explicitly after the binary returns, so they don't have to scroll back:

"${CLAUDE_PLUGIN_ROOT}/bin/factory-obs" dashboard

Environment overrides

Users may already have 3000/3100/4318/9090/8081 bound by another service. The binary honors these env vars (names documented in factory-obs help):

• VSDD_OBS_GRAFANA_PORT — Grafana UI port (default 3000)
• VSDD_OBS_LOKI_PORT — Loki HTTP port (default 3100)
• VSDD_OBS_OTLP_HTTP_PORT — OTLP HTTP receiver port (default 4318)
• VSDD_OBS_PROMETHEUS_PORT — Prometheus UI/API port (default 9090)
• VSDD_OBS_RENDERER_PORT — Grafana Image Renderer port (default 8081)
• VSDD_FACTORY_LOGS — single-path fallback for the logs dir when the registry is empty (legacy; prefer register)
• VSDD_OBS_REGISTRY — override the registry file location (primarily for bats tests; real users should leave this alone)
• VSDD_OBS_OPEN_BROWSER — 1 to force, 0 to suppress, unset for TTY auto-detect

Don't set these unless the user asked — defaults are correct for the typical case.

Output

Surface the binary's stdout to the user as-is. Do not summarize the container list or port mapping — the user will want to see the raw confirmation.

After up, it's helpful to remind the user that events only appear once a factory hook fires. A quick smoke test:

"${CLAUDE_PLUGIN_ROOT}/bin/emit-event" '{"type":"hook.action","hook":"manual-test","action":"smoke"}'

Events should be visible in Grafana within ~10 seconds.

When to use

• up — starting a session where the user wants to watch events live.
• down — freeing resources when done, without losing history.
• reset — collector is crash-looping or volumes are in a bad state.
• status — "is the stack running?" sanity check.
• logs — ingestion isn't flowing and we need to see collector output.
• register — user starts working on a NEW factory project and wants the existing stack to include its events. Run from inside the new project with no args, then factory-obs up to apply.
• unregister — user no longer wants to capture events from a factory they previously registered (archived project, etc.).
• list — audit time — "what factories is this stack watching?"
• regenerate — someone edited the registry file by hand and wants to preview the resulting docker-compose.override.yml before starting the stack.

Non-goals

This skill does not:

• Modify the base compose file or collector config (edits go through normal PR flow). The override file is regenerated each run — that one IS modified, but it's gitignored and machine-local.
• Start Claude Code's native OTel telemetry — that's orthogonal; use the /vsdd-factory:claude-telemetry skill for that.
• Run without Docker — no cloud fallback by design.
• Emit events itself — use emit-event or let hooks fire naturally.
• Scan the filesystem for factories automatically — registration is always explicit. This is deliberate: the plugin can be installed in projects anywhere on the filesystem, and we don't assume any parent directory (~/Dev, ~/work, etc.).

For querying the ingested data without Grafana, use factory-query, factory-report, or factory-replay from the shell.

Source: drbothen/vsdd-factory — distributed by TomeVault.