Service Reliability

Design reliability targets that people will actually act on, then operate them. This skill covers the judgment before the API call, which service-level indicator fits the data you have, what target is achievable rather than aspirational, whether an SLO is even the right instrument, and then the mechanics of creating, alerting on, resetting, and retiring SLOs through the Kibana API.

Reliability instruments are not interchangeable. An SLO measures a user-visible outcome against a spendable budget; a threshold rule fires on a raw condition; an anomaly job finds deviations where no fixed threshold exists; a synthetics monitor is the only one of the four that can see a service that has stopped emitting telemetry entirely. Choosing wrong produces alerts that are technically correct and operationally useless. For diagnosing a service that is already degraded, and for the incident workflow itself, use the observability-sre-triage skill; for general rule lifecycle mechanics use the kibana-alerting-rules skill.

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Environment Configuration

This skill executes Elasticsearch operations through the elastic CLI. If the elastic CLI is not installed, tell the user what it is needed for. Do not guess credentials, call the HTTP API directly, or attempt other workarounds.

This skill references operations in HTTP-shorthand form (e.g., GET /, GET /_cat/indices, GET /{index}/_mapping, GET /{index}/_settings/index.mode, POST /_query). The Operations table at the end of this document maps each shorthand to the equivalent elastic CLI command, always use the CLI rather than calling the HTTP API directly.

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Analysis without cluster access