A comprehensive Claude skill for IT operations professionals, covering infrastructure management, monitoring, incident response, automation, and disaster recovery.

Overview

This skill provides expert guidance on all aspects of IT operations, from managing servers and networks to implementing robust monitoring, handling incidents effectively, automating repetitive tasks, and ensuring business continuity through proper backup and disaster recovery procedures.

What This Skill Covers

Core Operations

Monitoring & Observability: Comprehensive monitoring strategies, alerting, dashboards, and SLI/SLO/SLA frameworks
Incident Management: Structured incident response, root cause analysis, post-mortems, and on-call management
Infrastructure Management: Server lifecycle, network operations, capacity planning, and cloud infrastructure
Automation: Scripting, configuration management, orchestration, and toil reduction strategies
Backup & Recovery: Backup strategies, disaster recovery planning, business continuity, and recovery testing

Key Frameworks

ITIL Service Management: Service strategy, design, transition, operation, and continual service improvement
Site Reliability Engineering (SRE): Error budgets, toil reduction, automation-first approach
Observability: The three pillars (metrics, logs, traces), Golden Signals, RED/USE methods
Incident Response: Severity classification, role assignments, communication protocols

Quick Start

For New Operations Teams

Start with Monitoring - reference/monitoring.md
- Set up basic infrastructure monitoring (CPU, memory, disk, network)
- Implement the Four Golden Signals (latency, traffic, errors, saturation)
- Configure alerting with proper thresholds
- Create operational dashboards
Establish Incident Response - reference/incident-management.md
- Define severity levels (P1-P4)
- Document escalation procedures
- Create on-call rotation
- Build incident response runbooks
Document Infrastructure - reference/infrastructure.md
- Inventory all servers and systems
- Document network topology
- Establish capacity planning baseline
- Create server provisioning procedures
Implement Backups - reference/backup-recovery.md
- Follow the 3-2-1 backup rule
- Define RPO/RTO for each system
- Automate backup processes
- Test recovery procedures
Automate Repetitive Tasks - reference/automation.md
- Identify high-ROI automation opportunities
- Start with scripts for common tasks
- Progress to configuration management
- Measure toil reduction

For Mature Operations Teams

Enhance your existing practices:

Advanced Observability: Implement distributed tracing, anomaly detection, predictive alerting
Self-Healing Systems: Build event-driven automation that responds to alerts automatically
Chaos Engineering: Proactively test system resilience through controlled failure injection
GitOps: Treat infrastructure as code with full CI/CD pipelines
Cost Optimization: Implement cloud cost management and right-sizing strategies

File Structure

it-operations/
├── SKILL.md                          # Main skill file with core principles and workflows
├── README.md                         # This file
└── reference/                        # Detailed technical references
    ├── monitoring.md                 # Observability, metrics, alerting, dashboards
    ├── incident-management.md        # Incident response, root cause analysis, post-mortems
    ├── infrastructure.md             # Server management, networking, capacity planning
    ├── automation.md                 # Scripting, configuration management, orchestration
    └── backup-recovery.md            # Backup strategies, disaster recovery, business continuity

Common Scenarios

Scenario 1: High CPU Alert

Problem: Alert fires indicating high CPU usage on production server

Response:

Check monitoring.md for diagnostic queries
Follow incident response workflow in incident-management.md
Investigate top CPU consumers
Decision:
- If capacity issue: Scale up (see infrastructure.md)
- If application issue: Engage development team
- If attack: Engage security team
Document in post-incident review

Scenario 2: Service Outage

Problem: Critical application is completely down

Response:

Declare P1 incident (incident-management.md)
Activate incident response team
Check recent changes (deployments, configuration)
Review runbook for service (see SKILL.md)
Consider rollback if recent deployment
Restore from backup if data corruption (backup-recovery.md)
Conduct blameless post-mortem

Scenario 3: Capacity Planning

Problem: Need to forecast infrastructure needs for next quarter

Response:

Collect baseline metrics (monitoring.md)
Analyze trends (infrastructure.md - Capacity Planning section)
Calculate growth rate and forecast
Plan procurement or cloud scaling
Budget approval and execution

Scenario 4: Disaster Recovery Test

Problem: Annual DR test is scheduled

Response:

Review DR plan (backup-recovery.md)
Notify stakeholders of test window
Execute failover to DR site
Validate all systems functional
Run for 4-8 hours
Failback to primary site
Document results and improvements

Scenario 5: Toil Reduction Initiative

Problem: Team spending too much time on manual tasks

Response:

Track time spent on tasks (weekly)
Calculate automation ROI (automation.md)
Prioritize high-impact, high-ROI tasks
Develop automation (scripts, then configuration management)
Measure time saved
Iterate and expand automation

Best Practices

Operational Excellence

Proactive Operations:

Monitor leading indicators, not just failures
Implement capacity planning (don't wait for outages)
Test disaster recovery regularly (quarterly minimum)
Automate repetitive tasks (reduce toil below 50%)

Blameless Culture:

Focus on systems, not people
Post-mortems are learning opportunities
Reward transparency and sharing failures
Track action items to completion

Documentation:

Runbooks for every service
Up-to-date architecture diagrams
Searchable knowledge base
Regularly reviewed and updated

Continuous Improvement:

Track operational metrics (MTTR, MTTA, toil percentage)
Regular retrospectives
Implement lessons learned from incidents
Share knowledge across teams

Key Metrics to Track

Reliability:

Availability (uptime percentage)
MTTR (Mean Time to Recovery)
MTTA (Mean Time to Acknowledge)
MTBF (Mean Time Between Failures)
Incident count by severity

Efficiency:

Toil percentage (target < 50%)
Automation coverage (target > 70%)
Alert volume (trending down)
False positive rate (target < 20%)

Capacity:

CPU utilization trends
Memory utilization trends
Storage growth rate
Network bandwidth usage

Change Management:

Change success rate (target > 95%)
Deployment frequency
Lead time for changes
Failed change percentage

Integration with Other Skills

This IT Operations skill complements:

DevOps/SRE: Collaboration on deployment automation, observability, and incident response
Security: Infrastructure security, access controls, patch management, compliance
Cloud Architecture: Cloud infrastructure management, cost optimization, cloud-native operations
Database Administration: Database monitoring, backups, performance tuning
Network Engineering: Network operations, firewall management, load balancing

Continuous Learning

Stay current with IT operations practices:

Industry Resources:

Google SRE Book (free online)
ITIL 4 Foundation
AWS Well-Architected Framework
Prometheus/Grafana documentation
HashiCorp Learn (Terraform, Vault)

Communities:

SRE Weekly newsletter
DevOps subreddit
USENIX LISA conference
Local DevOps/SRE meetups

Certifications:

ITIL 4 Foundation
AWS Certified SysOps Administrator
Certified Kubernetes Administrator (CKA)
Red Hat Certified System Administrator (RHCSA)

Getting Help

When working with this skill:

Start with SKILL.md for high-level guidance and decision frameworks
Reference specific guides for detailed technical procedures
Follow established workflows (monitoring → incident response → remediation → post-mortem)
Document improvements and update runbooks as you learn

Contributing

This skill improves through real-world experience. Consider updating:

Runbooks based on actual incidents
Automation scripts that proved valuable
Monitoring queries that caught issues early
Disaster recovery procedures after testing

Version History

v1.0 (2025-01-15): Initial release
- Core IT operations workflows
- Monitoring and observability
- Incident management
- Infrastructure operations
- Automation and orchestration
- Backup and disaster recovery

License

This skill is designed for use with Claude and follows IT operations industry best practices.