{"slug": "triage-production-incidents-with-a-single-prompt-using-the-appsignal-cli", "title": "Triage Production Incidents with a Single Prompt Using the AppSignal CLI", "summary": "AppSignal released a CLI tool that lets developers and AI agents triage production incidents with a single prompt, enabling searches of production logs, incident closures, and pull request checks from the terminal. Customer Oliver Kriška built an agent skill around the CLI, reducing what previously took half a day of data gathering to seconds. The CLI supports machine-readable JSON output and composable query syntax for reliable automation.", "body_md": "AppSignal\n\n# Triage Production Incidents with a Single Prompt Using the AppSignal CLI\n\nAt AppSignal, we love talking to our customers to learn how they're using the product. Recently, one of them showed us something worth sharing: with a single chat prompt, his AI agent searches production logs, closes incidents, and checks whether a pull request has shipped. Automating that kind of work turned out to be a matter of building the right agent skill.\n\nThat customer is [Oliver Kriška](https://www.linkedin.com/in/quatermain/?locale=en). He helps companies cut costs, remove bottlenecks, and keep their systems reliable as they scale. Much of his work is with high-availability platforms for fintech, SaaS, and q-commerce, including payment systems for regulated markets across several countries. He also builds practical AI integrations into products and team workflows, which is exactly where the agent skill in this article fits.\n\nWe learned from Oliver how he uses the AppSignal CLI with his agents to check shipped pull requests, close incidents quickly, and pull the context he needs from production logs. As Oliver tells it, the agent skill finally made that data easy to reach:\n\nThe monitoring data was always there. What was missing was a way to reach it without leaving the terminal. Now I ask in plain words and the agent runs the same commands I would run myself. It just remembers the flags for me. What used to cost me half a day of gathering data, I have in seconds.\n\nIn this article, we'll walk through what the AppSignal CLI can do, and how wrapping it in an agent skill lets you ask for those commands in plain language.\n\nMeet the AppSignal CLI\n\nThe [AppSignal CLI](https://github.com/appsignal/appsignal-cli) is our official command-line tool, and it works well for both people and AI agents. It has stable subcommands, real `--output json`\n\nfor machine-readable results and LLMs, and a composable query syntax. Those are the qualities an agent needs to drive a tool reliably.\n\nIt also meets developers in the workflow they already use. You can search logs, check deploys, and update incidents straight from your editor and terminal, without breaking focus to switch to a browser tab.\n\nGetting started takes two commands. Install it with Homebrew:\n\nThen authenticate once through your browser:\n\nFrom there, the CLI is ready. Oliver wrote his own agent skill to drive it, but you don't have to start from scratch: the CLI ships with a bundled one you can install in one command.\n\nSo what exactly is an agent skill, and why wrap the CLI in one? Let's break it down.\n\nWhat Is an Agent Skill?\n\nAn agent skill is a short, plain-text file that teaches an AI coding agent like Claude how to do one specific task, so you can ask for it in plain words instead of explaining the steps each time. It's more than a list of commands. A good agent skill tells the agent three things: when a task applies, which tools or commands to reach for, and how to read the results. It also points out the common mistakes, so the agent gets things right the first time.\n\nOnce the agent skill is in place, you don't have to remember the exact command, flag, or query syntax. You describe what you want, such as \"search production for errors in the last hour,\" and the agent reads the skill, runs the right command, and gives you the answer.\n\nA minimal agent skill is a file with a short header and a few instructions, like the one Oliver uses to drive the CLI:\n\nThat's the whole idea. Now let's look at what Oliver's agent skill lets him do with the AppSignal CLI.\n\nWhat the Agent Skill Lets You Do\n\nIn each case below, Oliver types a plain-language request, and the agent skill turns it into the right AppSignal CLI command.\n\nSearch and Tail Production Logs\n\nNot every incident leaves behind an error for AppSignal to catch. A request that runs out of memory and gets killed, or a user action that quietly fails, might never surface as one. But the logs still record what happened at that exact moment, and that single log line is often the whole answer.\n\nSearch production for errors in the last hour.\n\nBehind the scenes, the agent skill runs:\n\nNeed to watch events as they happen? The agent skill can stream them live:\n\nTriage and Update Incidents\n\nThe agent skill doesn't only read. It can act. Oliver uses it to list open incidents, then close or re-prioritize them without leaving the chat.\n\nClose incident 1423.\n\nAssigning an incident and setting its severity is just as quick:\n\nAnswer \"Is My PR Deployed Yet?\"\n\nDeploy markers map a revision to the moment it went live, so the agent skill can answer one of the most common questions on any team.\n\nIs my latest change live in production yet?\n\nThe agent correlates the revision with the incident you're investigating, and tells you whether the deploy you're worried about has actually landed.\n\nDefine Anomaly Triggers as Code\n\nThe agent skill can also set up alerts for you. You tell it which metric to watch and the limit that matters, and it creates a rule that notifies you when the metric crosses that line.\n\nNotify me when the P95 queue time goes over 100ms.\n\nManage Dashboards from the Terminal\n\nThe agent skill can also list your dashboards or create a new one from the terminal:\n\nThe `create`\n\ncommand sets the dashboard's title and description. You still add the graphs themselves in the AppSignal UI.\n\nWhy Drive the CLI with an Agent Skill?\n\nYou could run every one of these commands by hand. Wrapping them in an agent skill adds a few things:\n\n**Plain language over syntax.** You describe the goal; the agent skill\nremembers the exact flags, query syntax, and app IDs.\n\n**The right tool, every time.** A good agent skill knows its own boundaries\nand hands off to the correct command instead of guessing.\n\n**Built-in guardrails.** Oliver's agent skill documents gotchas, such as\nrunning from the project root and the fact that authentication is\ninteractive, so the agent avoids the mistakes that cost real time.\n\n**Reusable and shareable.** An agent skill is a plain file. Write it once,\ndrop it into your team's repo, and everyone's agent gains the same\ncapabilities.\n\nThe CLI, the MCP Server, and the API\n\nThe CLI is one of several ways to reach your AppSignal data, and each suits a different audience:\n\n**The** is ideal for the terminal: log tailing, deploy markers, and incident updates from the shell, whether you're at the keyboard or an agent is driving.[AppSignal CLI](https://github.com/appsignal/appsignal-cli)**The** exposes the same monitoring data as tools an AI assistant can call conversationally, right inside your editor.[AppSignal MCP Server](https://docs.appsignal.com/mcp.html)is for code: custom integrations that pipe AppSignal data into your own systems.[The REST API](https://docs.appsignal.com/api/v2/overview)\n\nThe short version: **the API is for code, and the MCP Server and CLI are for AI agents and people**, all reading from the same monitoring data underneath.\n\nReal-World Use Cases\n\nOnce the agent skill is in place, these everyday tasks become a plain-language request. A few scenarios Oliver runs regularly:\n\n**Post-incident retrospectives:**\"Pull the error logs between 4:00 and 4:15 this morning,\" and read the exact lines from that window.** Deploy verification:**\"Did the checkout fix ship, and is that incident still open?\" The agent checks deploy markers and incidents together.** Clearing the incident backlog:**\"List everything still open in the web namespace, and close the ones I've already fixed.\"** Setting up monitoring:**\"Watch our database queue time and notify us when it goes over our limit.\"\n\nEach of these used to mean recalling a command and its flags. Now they're a single sentence.\n\nBring AppSignal into Your AI Workflow\n\nAs AI agents take on more of the daily work of shipping software, the tools that work well with them stand out. The AppSignal CLI fits this well: it's stable, scriptable, and works the same whether you run it yourself or let an agent run it. An agent skill is the thin layer that lets you ask for it in plain language.\n\n**Got questions or an agent skill of your own to share?** We're always listening! Reach out in our [Discord community](https://discord.gg/sBWWGwYzfC) or email us at [support@appsignal.com](mailto:support@appsignal.com).\n\nPublished\n\n## Wondering what you can do next?\n\n## Karen Patteri de Souza\n\nAI advocate and Senior Technical Writer at AppSignal, shaping developer-first documentation at the intersection of LLMs, SDKs, APIs, and user experience. Always up for chatting about LLMs in docs, LLM output quality evaluation, scientific research, music, and great films or series.\n\n[All articles by Karen Patteri de Souza](/authors/karen-patteri-de-souza.html)\n\nBecome our next author!\n\n[Find out more](/write-for-us.html)\n\n## AppSignal monitors your apps\n\nAppSignal provides insights for Ruby, Rails, Elixir, Phoenix, Node.js, Express and many other frameworks and libraries. We are located in beautiful Amsterdam. We love [stroopwafels](https://www.appsignal.com/waffles). If you do too, [let us know](mailto:contact@appsignal.com). We might send you some!\n\n[Discover AppSignal](https://www.appsignal.com)", "url": "https://wpnews.pro/news/triage-production-incidents-with-a-single-prompt-using-the-appsignal-cli", "canonical_source": "https://blog.appsignal.com/2026/07/30/how-a-customer-drives-the-appsignal-cli-with-a-claude-skill.html", "published_at": "2026-07-30 00:00:00+00:00", "updated_at": "2026-07-30 13:58:54.217792+00:00", "lang": "en", "topics": ["developer-tools", "ai-agents", "artificial-intelligence"], "entities": ["AppSignal", "AppSignal CLI", "Oliver Kriška"], "alternates": {"html": "https://wpnews.pro/news/triage-production-incidents-with-a-single-prompt-using-the-appsignal-cli", "markdown": "https://wpnews.pro/news/triage-production-incidents-with-a-single-prompt-using-the-appsignal-cli.md", "text": "https://wpnews.pro/news/triage-production-incidents-with-a-single-prompt-using-the-appsignal-cli.txt", "jsonld": "https://wpnews.pro/news/triage-production-incidents-with-a-single-prompt-using-the-appsignal-cli.jsonld"}}