agent-skill

Migrating from Honeycomb Beelines (End of Life) to OpenTelemetry. Trigger phrases: "migrate from Beelines", "upgrade from Beeline to OpenTelemetry", "migrate to OTel", "replace Beelines", "Beeline end of life", "Beeline EOL", "switch from Beeline to OTel", "migrate Go/Python/Node/Java/Ruby Beeline", "W3C trace headers", "W3C propagation", "incremental migration to OpenTelemetry".

Design and create a Honeycomb board (dashboard) with queries and SLOs. Trigger phrases: "make a board", "build a dashboard", "create a Honeycomb board", "make a dashboard in Honeycomb", "set up a board", "dashboard for my service", "visualize service health", "golden signals dashboard", "set up monitoring board".

Querying OpenTelemetry metrics datasets in Honeycomb, whose rules differ from trace/event datasets: bare COUNT, RATE_SUM, RATE_AVG, RATE_MAX and CONCURRENCY are forbidden, temporal aggregation is automatic, and each metric has its own attributes. Use for gauges, counters, histograms and sums; temporal aggregation (RATE, INCREASE, SUMMARIZE, LAST); finding the metrics dataset, metric names and attributes; unexpected metrics results; infrastructure metrics (CPU, memory, disk I/O, network). Not for instrumenting metrics (use otel-instrumentation), event datasets with "metrics" in their name, or conceptual questions (use observability-fundamentals).

First principles of observability: wide events, high cardinality, the core analysis loop, events vs metrics vs logs, and how instrumentation connects to debugging. Trigger phrases: "what is observability", "why observability", "why Honeycomb", "events vs metrics vs logs", "why wide events", "what is high cardinality", "core analysis loop", "observability vs monitoring", "what is dimensionality", "explain observability".

Instrumenting GenAI/LLM applications with OpenTelemetry for Honeycomb, including content capture and agent failure detection. Trigger phrases: "instrument my GenAI app", "add tracing to LLM calls", "trace AI agent", "instrument OpenAI", "instrument Anthropic", "GenAI observability", "trace tool calling", "LLM token usage", "instrument embeddings", "trace MCP", "GenAI metrics", "instrument LangChain", "add GenAI spans", "capture prompts", "capture LLM responses", "enable GenAI content capture", "streaming tracing", "trace streaming responses".

OpenTelemetry SDK setup, custom instrumentation, and sending data to Honeycomb. Trigger phrases: "instrument my app", "add tracing", "set up OpenTelemetry", "configure OTel", "add custom spans", "add attributes to spans", "send traces to Honeycomb", "set up OTLP", "configure sampling", "add span events", "add span links", "set up tracing for [any language]", "configure the OTel Collector".

Retrofitting OpenTelemetry into an existing, uninstrumented application. Trigger phrases: "migrate existing app to OTel", "add OpenTelemetry to existing project", "retrofit OTel into my codebase", "thread context through my code", "context propagation", "bridge Prometheus metrics to OTel", "logging bridge", "migrate logging to OTel", "slog bridge", "logback bridge", "verify my instrumentation", "traces are disconnected", "orphaned spans", "migrate to OpenTelemetry", "OTel migration plan", "how do I sequence an OTel migration", "add tracing to existing code", "refactor for context propagation", "Fiber context gotcha", "keep existing logging working with OTel", "add OTel without breaking Prometheus", "bridge existing metrics", "coexist with existing monitoring". For greenfield instrumentation use otel-instrumentation; for Beelines use beeline-migration.

Workflows for investigating production issues in Honeycomb: context priming, broad query, BubbleUp, trace analysis, verification, and chaining results between steps to a root cause. Trigger phrases: "investigate production issue", "debug latency spike", "find root cause", "use BubbleUp", "analyze traces", "debug an outage", "why is my API slow", "errors are increasing", "health check", "SLO burning".

Constructing and interpreting Honeycomb queries on trace, log and event datasets: operation selection (percentiles not AVG, HEATMAP for distributions), relational fields (root., parent., any., none.), calculated fields, query math, and reading results (P99/P50 ratios, heatmap bands, TOTAL/OTHER rows, raw JSON via query_result_json). Trigger phrases: "show me latency", "error rate", "find slow requests", "find outliers", "interpret results", "relational fields", "calculated fields", "download raw results". For metrics datasets (dataset_type=metrics) use metrics-queries.

Interpreting Honeycomb SLO compliance, burn rates and trigger status, and what to do about them: detecting misconfigured SLIs, freezing deploys vs paging on-call, designing burn alert thresholds. Load before calling get_slos or get_triggers. Trigger phrases: "check our SLOs", "are we meeting our SLOs", "which SLOs are healthy", "is the error budget OK", "are any alerts firing", "what's the burn rate", "set up an SLO", "create a trigger", "configure alerts", "set up burn alerts", "check trigger status", "starting on-call", "reliability picture", "should we freeze deploys", "is this SLO misconfigured", "are we within budget", "SLO is broken", "budget is negative".

Find a recent trace in Honeycomb, to see what happened in a recent test. Use when asked to "verify in Honeycomb", "find the most recent trace", or "show me the trace".