home / skills / jeremylongshore / claude-code-plugins-plus-skills / collecting-infrastructure-metrics

This skill automates infrastructure metrics collection across compute, storage, network, containers, and databases to enable monitoring and dashboards.

npx playbooks add skill jeremylongshore/claude-code-plugins-plus-skills --skill collecting-infrastructure-metrics

Review the files below or copy the command above to add this skill to your agents.

Files (4)
SKILL.md
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---
name: collecting-infrastructure-metrics
description: Collect comprehensive infrastructure performance metrics across compute, storage, network, containers, load balancers, and databases. Use when monitoring system performance or troubleshooting infrastructure issues. Trigger with phrases like "collect infrastructure metrics", "monitor server performance", or "track system resources".
version: 1.0.0
allowed-tools: "Read, Write, Edit, Grep, Glob, Bash(metrics:*), Bash(monitoring:*), Bash(system:*)"
license: MIT
author: Jeremy Longshore <[email protected]>
---
# Infrastructure Metrics Collector

This skill provides automated assistance for infrastructure metrics collector tasks.

## Overview

This skill automates the process of setting up infrastructure metrics collection. It identifies key performance indicators (KPIs) across various infrastructure layers, configures agents to collect these metrics, and assists in setting up central aggregation and visualization.

## How It Works

1. **Identify Infrastructure Layers**: Determines the infrastructure layers to monitor (compute, storage, network, containers, load balancers, databases).
2. **Configure Metrics Collection**: Sets up agents (Prometheus, Datadog, CloudWatch) to collect metrics from the identified layers.
3. **Aggregate Metrics**: Configures central aggregation of the collected metrics for analysis and visualization.
4. **Create Dashboards**: Generates infrastructure dashboards for health monitoring, performance analysis, and capacity tracking.

## When to Use This Skill

This skill activates when you need to:
- Monitor the performance of your infrastructure.
- Identify bottlenecks in your system.
- Set up dashboards for real-time monitoring.

## Examples

### Example 1: Setting up basic monitoring

User request: "Collect infrastructure metrics for my web server."

The skill will:
1. Identify compute, storage, and network layers relevant to the web server.
2. Configure Prometheus to collect CPU, memory, disk I/O, and network bandwidth metrics.

### Example 2: Troubleshooting database performance

User request: "I'm seeing slow database queries. Can you help me monitor the database performance?"

The skill will:
1. Identify the database layer and relevant metrics such as connection pool usage, replication lag, and cache hit rates.
2. Configure Datadog to collect these metrics and create a dashboard to visualize performance trends.

## Best Practices

- **Agent Selection**: Choose the appropriate agent (Prometheus, Datadog, CloudWatch) based on your existing infrastructure and monitoring tools.
- **Metric Granularity**: Balance the granularity of metrics collection with the storage and processing overhead. Collect only the essential metrics for your use case.
- **Alerting**: Configure alerts based on thresholds for key metrics to proactively identify and address performance issues.

## Integration

This skill can be integrated with other plugins for deployment, configuration management, and alerting to provide a comprehensive infrastructure management solution. For example, it can be used with a deployment plugin to automatically configure metrics collection after deploying new infrastructure.

## Prerequisites

- Access to infrastructure monitoring systems (Prometheus, Datadog, CloudWatch)
- System permissions for metrics agent installation
- Network access to monitored infrastructure components
- Storage for metrics data in {baseDir}/metrics/

## Instructions

1. Identify infrastructure layers to monitor (compute, storage, network, databases)
2. Select appropriate metrics collection agent based on environment
3. Configure agent with target endpoints and metric types
4. Set up central aggregation for collected metrics
5. Create dashboards for visualization
6. Configure alerts for critical metrics thresholds

## Output

- Metrics collection configuration files
- Agent installation and setup scripts
- Dashboard definitions for infrastructure monitoring
- Metric export configurations
- Alert rules for critical thresholds

## Error Handling

If metrics collection fails:
- Verify agent installation and permissions
- Check network connectivity to targets
- Validate authentication credentials
- Review firewall and security group rules
- Confirm metric endpoint availability

## Resources

- Prometheus documentation for metric collection
- Datadog agent configuration guides
- AWS CloudWatch metrics reference
- Infrastructure monitoring best practices

Overview

This skill automates collecting comprehensive infrastructure performance metrics across compute, storage, network, containers, load balancers, and databases. It helps identify key KPIs, deploy and configure collection agents, and create centralized aggregation and dashboards. Use it to get consistent, actionable telemetry for monitoring and troubleshooting.

How this skill works

The skill first inspects the target environment to determine which infrastructure layers and endpoints need monitoring. It recommends and configures agents (Prometheus, Datadog, CloudWatch) and generates agent installation or configuration scripts. Collected metrics are routed to a central aggregation layer and dashboard templates are created for real-time visualization and analysis. It also outputs alert rules and export configurations for operational workflows.

When to use it

  • Setting up monitoring for new or existing servers and clusters
  • Troubleshooting performance issues like high latency, CPU/memory pressure, or storage I/O bottlenecks
  • Creating dashboards for SREs, ops teams, or application owners
  • Standardizing metrics collection across hybrid or multi-cloud environments
  • Preparing for capacity planning or incident response exercises

Best practices

  • Choose agents that align with your existing toolchain and cloud provider to minimize duplication
  • Collect only essential metrics at a sensible scrape interval to reduce storage and processing cost
  • Define clear alert thresholds and escalation policies tied to business impact
  • Instrument key application and database metrics in addition to infrastructure signals
  • Version-control configuration and dashboard definitions for repeatable deployments

Example use cases

  • Basic server monitoring: install Prometheus node exporter and collect CPU, memory, disk I/O, and network metrics for web servers
  • Database troubleshooting: collect connection pool usage, query latency, replication lag, and cache hit rates and build a DB performance dashboard
  • Container visibility: configure Prometheus or a cloud agent to scrape container CPU/memory, restart counts, and network usage across clusters
  • Load balancer health: capture request rates, error rates, and latency percentiles and wire alerts for sudden degradation
  • Hybrid environment: standardize collection across on-prem and cloud using exporters and a central aggregation endpoint

FAQ

What access do I need to run this skill?

You need permissions to install or configure monitoring agents on target hosts, network access to scrape endpoints, and credentials for your aggregation or cloud monitoring service.

Which agent should I choose: Prometheus, Datadog, or CloudWatch?

Choose based on your environment: Prometheus for open-source flexibility and Kubernetes, Datadog for SaaS ease and integrated APM, CloudWatch for native AWS telemetry and billing simplicity.