prometheus-go-code-review

What This Skill Does

The prometheus-go-code-review skill is a specialized diagnostic tool designed to analyze your Go source code for adherence to Prometheus instrumentation best practices. It automatically scans your implementation for common pitfalls, such as the use of high-cardinality labels which can lead to memory exhaustion in your TSDB, incorrect selection of metric types like Gauges versus Counters, and performance issues caused by registering metrics inside request handlers. By leveraging this skill, developers ensure their observability stack remains performant, scalable, and compliant with Prometheus naming conventions, specifically regarding snake_case and mandatory unit suffixes.

Installation

You can install the skill by running the following command in your terminal: clawhub install openclaw/skills/skills/anderskev/prometheus-go-code-review

Use Cases

Use this skill during pull request reviews or when refactoring microservices. It is particularly valuable when:

• Onboarding new engineers who are unfamiliar with Prometheus standards.
• Auditing existing codebases for potential memory leaks caused by unbounded label sets.
• Preparing a service for high-traffic production environments where efficient metric ingestion is critical.
• Standardizing metrics across multiple microservices to ensure consistent alerting and dashboarding.

Example Prompts

1. "Review this code snippet to ensure my Prometheus metrics are registered correctly and won't cause panic on multiple calls: [paste code]"
2. "Can you audit these custom metrics for potential high-cardinality label issues? I'm seeing ballooning memory usage in my Prometheus server."
3. "Check if these histogram bucket boundaries are appropriate for a service with latency in the millisecond range."

Tips & Limitations

• Tips: Always define your metrics as global variables or within a struct initialized during application startup to avoid registration race conditions. Use the promauto package to simplify registration, but be wary of where those metrics are instantiated. Ensure your metrics have clear, descriptive help text for other developers.
• Limitations: This skill focuses on static code analysis and cannot identify runtime-specific label cardinality issues occurring within complex production traffic patterns. It also assumes you are using the standard prometheus/client_golang library and may not fully account for custom wrappers or alternative observability providers.