querying-tophog

Query tophog — the ingestion pipeline's heavy-hitter store in ClickHouse — to identify hot or expensive actors (team_id, distinct_id, session_id, partition) during incident triage. Use when investigating ingestion lag, a hot or lagging Kafka partition, expensive person processing, merge storms, or any "which team or distinct_id is causing this" question. Covers the internal Metabase access path (SSO via hogli), the tophog schema, and the cost-vs-volume query lens. Internal-only: results contain cross-customer identifiers.

Quality

85%

Does it follow best practices?

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Securityby

Passed

No findings from the security scan

Quality

Content

82%Weight 40%Scale 1-5

Reviews the quality of instructions and guidance provided to agents. Good implementation is clear, handles edge cases, and produces reliable results.

A well-structured, highly actionable triage skill with copy-paste commands and canned queries, clear sequencing, and sensible validation guidance. Minor conciseness trims and slightly stronger access-failure recovery would push it higher.

Suggestions

Trim the Chrome Safe Storage/browser_cookie3 aside and the 'real incident' anecdote, or move them to a short footnote, to tighten conciseness toward a 5.

Add a brief error-recovery note for the access path (e.g., what to do if `hogli metabase:login` fails or the database id is not found) to strengthen the workflow's feedback loop.

Consider extracting the canned SQL queries into a references/ file with a one-line pointer from SKILL.md, which would improve progressive_disclosure and reduce token load when only discovery is needed.

Dimension	Reasoning	Score
Conciseness	Dense and domain-specific with little padding of concepts Claude already knows, but a few asides could be trimmed (the Chrome Safe Storage/browser_cookie3 explanation and the 'a real incident: the top-cost actor was invisible' anecdote), keeping it just short of fully lean.	4 / 5
Actionability	Fully executable, copy-paste-ready guidance: concrete `hogli metabase:login/query` commands with --region flags and a database-discovery command, plus canned SQL queries covering the top-actors, partition-scoped, merge-storm, and generic top-10 cases.	5 / 5
Workflow Clarity	Clear numbered login -> discover database id -> run queries sequence with validation checkpoints ('Always start with discovery' and the partition-dimension check query); read-only triage so the destructive-cap does not apply, but error-recovery feedback loops for access failures are only implicit.	4 / 5
Progressive Disclosure	Well-organized into clearly headed sections (Access, Schema, Metric inventory, Lens, Canned queries, Cautions, Related) with clear sibling-skill pointers; no bundle files exist to split further, and at ~200 lines it does not qualify for the simple-skill exception to 5.	4 / 5
	Total	17 / 20 Passed

Description

87%Weight 40%Scale 1-5

Based on the skill's description, can an agent find and select it at the right time? Clear, specific descriptions lead to better discovery.

A high-quality description that clearly states what the skill does and when to use it, with natural incident-triage trigger terms and a distinct niche. Slightly short of maximum specificity and trigger-term breadth, but completeness and distinctiveness are excellent.

Dimension	Reasoning	Score
Specificity	Names the domain and several concrete capabilities ('identify hot or expensive actors (team_id, distinct_id, session_id, partition)', 'Covers the internal Metabase access path (SSO via hogli), the tophog schema, and the cost-vs-volume query lens'), with only minor coverage gaps; not a full laundry list of actions so not a 5.	4 / 5
Completeness	Explicitly answers both what ('Query tophog...to identify hot or expensive actors...Covers the internal Metabase access path, the tophog schema, and the cost-vs-volume query lens') and when ('Use when investigating ingestion lag...merge storms, or any "which team or distinct_id is causing this" question') with concrete trigger phrases.	5 / 5
Trigger Term Quality	Strong natural on-call phrases ('ingestion lag', 'hot or lagging Kafka partition', 'expensive person processing', 'merge storms', 'which team or distinct_id is causing this') that an engineer would actually say; short of comprehensive synonym/file-extension coverage so not a 5.	4 / 5
Distinctiveness Conflict Risk	Occupies a clear niche (tophog heavy-hitter store in ClickHouse for ingestion triage) with distinct triggers and is explicitly contrasted against the Grafana-side sibling skill, giving minimal conflict risk.	5 / 5
	Total	18 / 20 Passed

Validation

100%

Warnings & errors only

Checks the skill against the spec for correct structure and formatting. All validation checks must pass before discovery and implementation can be scored.

Validation — 16 / 16 Passed

Validation for skill structure

No warnings or errors.

Repository: PostHog/posthog
Path: .agents/skills/querying-tophog/SKILL.md
Commit: 06292db

Reviewed: 19 minutes ago

Table of Contents

Discovery Implementation Validation

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