name: rust-observability description: "Rust observability skill for tracing, metrics, structured logging, OpenTelemetry pipelines, and production incident diagnostics."---

Rust Observability Skill

Core Question

Which telemetry signals reduce mean time to detect and resolve production failures?

Signal Model

- Logs: contextual events and state snapshots. - Traces: cross-service causal path and latency breakdown. - Metrics: rate/error/duration + saturation and capacity.

Use all three intentionally, not interchangeably.

Instrumentation Priorities

1. Request entry/exit and key business operations. 2. Downstream calls (DB, cache, RPC, queue). 3. Retry/timeouts and circuit-breaker transitions. 4. Queue depth and worker saturation.

Logging Rules

- Structured logs only. - No secrets/tokens/PII leakage. - Stable field names for dashboards and alerts.

Metrics Rules

- Keep label cardinality bounded. - Prefer RED + USE style baseline metrics. - Track queue/worker/resource saturation explicitly.

Common Pitfalls

- High-cardinality labels (raw user/session IDs). - Verbose debug logs on hot paths in production. - Traces without propagated correlation context. - Alert thresholds not aligned with SLOs.

Review Checklist

- [ ] Critical path spans and error fields exist. - [ ] Metrics cover latency/errors/saturation. - [ ] Correlation IDs flow across service boundaries. - [ ] Logging policy prevents sensitive data exposure. - [ ] Alerts map to actionable runbooks.

Verification Commands

cargo check
cargo test
cargo clippy
RUST_LOG=info cargo run

Related Skills

- rust-web - rust-database - rust-concurrency

Localized Reference

- Original Chinese version is preserved in SKILL_ZH.md.