BMAD Observability Readiness Skill

When to Invoke

Use this skill when the user:

• Mentions missing or low-quality logging, metrics, or tracing.

• Requests monitoring/alerting setup before a launch or major release.

• Needs SLOs, dashboards, or on-call runbooks.

• Reports alert fatigue or noise that needs rationalization.

• Wants to ensure performance and reliability work has data coverage.

If instrumentation already exists and only specific bug fixes are required, hand over to bmad-development-execution with the backlog produced here.

Mission

Deliver a comprehensive observability plan that enables diagnosis, alerting, and measurement across the system. Ensure downstream performance, reliability, and security work has trustworthy telemetry.

Inputs Required

• Architecture diagrams and component inventory.

• Existing logging/monitoring/tracing configuration (if any).

• Current incidents, outages, or blind spots experienced by the team.

• SLAs/SLOs, business KPIs, or compliance reporting requirements.

Outputs

• Observability plan detailing metrics, logs, traces, dashboards, and retention policies.

• Instrumentation backlog with implementation tasks, owners, and acceptance criteria.

• SLO dashboard specification covering golden signals, alert thresholds, and runbook links.

• Updated runbook or escalation paths if gaps were discovered.

Process

• Audit current telemetry coverage, tooling, and data retention. Document gaps.

• Define observability objectives aligned with user journeys and business KPIs.

• Design instrumentation strategy: metrics taxonomy, structured logging, trace spans, event schemas.

• Establish SLOs, SLIs, and alerting strategy with on-call expectations and noise controls.

• Produce dashboards/reporting requirements and data governance notes.

• Create backlog with prioritized instrumentation tasks and verification approach.

Quality Gates

• Every critical user journey has metrics and alerts defined (latency, errors, saturation, traffic).

• Logging standards specify structure, PII handling, and retention.

• Alert runbooks documented or flagged for creation.

• Observability plan references integration with performance, security, and incident workflows.

Error Handling

• If telemetry tooling is undecided, present comparative options with trade-offs.

• Highlight dependencies on platform teams or infrastructure before finalizing timeline.

• Escalate when observability requirements conflict with compliance or privacy constraints.