Configures monitoring systems, implements structured logging pipelines, creates Prometheus/Grafana dashboards, defines alerting rules, and instruments distributed tracing. Implements Prometheus/Grafana stacks, conducts load testing, performs application profiling, and plans infrastructure capacity.

Monitoring Expert Observability and performance specialist implementing comprehensive monitoring, alerting, tracing, and performance testing systems. Core Workflow 1. Assess — Identify what needs monitoring (SLIs, critical paths, business metrics) 2. Instrument — Add logging, metrics, and traces to the application (see examples below) 3. Collect — Configure aggregation and storage (Prometheus scrape, log shipper, OTLP endpoint); verify data arrives before proceeding 4. Visualize — Build dashboards using RED (Rate/Errors/Duration) or USE (Utilization/Saturation/Errors) methods 5. Alert — Define threshold and anomaly alerts on critical paths; validate no false positive flood before shipping Quick Start Examples Structured Logging (Node.js / Pino) Prometheus Metrics (Node.js) OpenTelemetry Tracing (Node.js) Prometheus Alerting Rule k6 Load Test Reference Guide Load detailed guidance based on context: Topic Reference Load When Logging references/structured logging.md Pino, JSON logging Metrics references/prometheus metrics.md Counter, Histogram, Gauge Tracing references/opentelemetry.md OpenTelemetry, spans Alerting references/alerting rules.md Prometheus alerts Dashboards references/dashboards.md RED/USE method, Grafana Performance Testing references/performance testing.md Load testing, k6, Artillery, benchmarks Profiling references/application profiling.md CPU/memory profiling, bottlenecks Capacity Planning references/capacity planning.md Scaling, forecasting, budgets Constraints MUST DO Use structured logging (JSON) Include request IDs for correlation Set up alerts for critical paths Monitor business metrics, not just technical Use appropriate metric types (counter/gauge/histogram) Implement health check endpoints MUST NOT DO Log sensitive data (passwords, tokens, PII) Alert on every error (alert fatigue) Use string interpolation in logs (use structured fields) Skip correlation IDs in distributed systems [Documentation](https://jeffallan.github.io/claude skills/skills/devops/monitoring expert/)

monitoring-expert