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Skills / Starter / Read application logs

Starter Code skill

Read application logs

Read application logs as time-bounded evidence while preserving context, uncertainty, and sensitive-data boundaries.

Start from a specific question and widen only when the evidence requires it.

Procedure

  1. State the symptom, affected scope, environment, time window, and expected behavior.
  2. Confirm clock, timezone, deployment, instance, and log-source coverage.
  3. Search by stable request, job, account-safe, error, or trace identifiers.
  4. Reconstruct events in time order across relevant services and retries.
  5. Separate application failures, dependency failures, client cancellations, and logging gaps.
  6. Compare the affected path with a known-good request or adjacent time window.
  7. Redact credentials and personal data before sharing excerpts.
  8. Save a diagnostic report with queries, evidence, limits, and the next supported check.

Guardrails

  • Never treat absence of a log as proof that an event did not occur.
  • Do not paste whole production records when a bounded redacted excerpt is sufficient.
  • Preserve original timestamps and source identity when exporting evidence.

Related skills

  • Read a stack trace — Read a stack trace by identifying the failure, call path, application frames, runtime context, and first evidence-backed investigation point.
  • Reproduce a bug — Build a minimal, repeatable reproduction of a software defect while controlling environment, inputs, and state.
  • Read a package lockfile — Read a package lockfile to identify resolved versions, dependency paths, integrity, sources, platforms, and unexpected changes.