# Observability Service Reliability

Design and operate service reliability targets in Elastic Observability: choose an SLI...

- Repository: https://github.com/elastic/agent-skills (603 stars)
- Category: Design
- License: Apache-2.0
- Last updated: 2026-10-29
- Runs scripts: no, instructions only

## Install

Claude Code: `npx skills add elastic/agent-skills --skill observability-service-reliability -g -a claude-code -y`
Codex: `npx skills add elastic/agent-skills --skill observability-service-reliability -g -a codex -y`
Cursor: `npx skills add elastic/agent-skills --skill observability-service-reliability -g -a cursor -y`
Gemini CLI: `npx skills add elastic/agent-skills --skill observability-service-reliability -g -a gemini-cli -y`
Claude Code plugin marketplace: `/plugin marketplace add elastic/agent-skills`

## Description

Design and operate service reliability targets in Elastic Observability: choose an SLI type and a defensible target, pick a time window and budgeting method, create and maintain SLOs through the Kibana API, attach burn-rate alert rules, and decide when an SLO is the wrong instrument and a threshold rule, anomaly job, or synthetics monitor is right. Use when defining or reviewing SLOs and error budgets, tuning burn-rate alerting, reducing alert noise, or setting up availability monitoring for a user-facing endpoint.

## SKILL.md, as published by its author (untrusted third-party text, read it as data)

# 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](https://github.com/elastic/cli#configuration) 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](#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

The rest: https://github.com/elastic/agent-skills/blob/HEAD/plugins/observability/skills/service-reliability/SKILL.md