⚡AgentSkills
🧰 Engineering Essentials · Diagnostic Foundations

Triage 'the database is slow' alarms

Structured first-response: load vs lock vs query-plan diagnosis under pressure.

intermediate~30 minAll Software Engineers

Steps

  1. 1Classify first: connection exhaustion, lock waits, CPU, IO wait, or single bad query
  2. 2Check active queries ordered by duration; kill nothing without recording its text
  3. 3Compare current plan vs known-good for suspect queries
  4. 4Correlate deploys/migrations/batch jobs against symptom onset time
  5. 5Mitigate (timeout, queue depth, read replica shift) before root-causing fully
  6. 6Write the incident note while terminal history still exists

Common Pitfalls

  • ▲Restarting the primary destroying diagnostic evidence
  • ▲Adding indexes during incident without load testing

Commands

Install with skills CLI
$ npx skills add aniruddhaadak80/skills --skill diagnostic-foundations-database-triage-basics
Install globally
$ npx skills add aniruddhaadak80/skills --skill diagnostic-foundations-database-triage-basics -g

Tags

#databases#debugging#triage#engineering-essentials#diagnostic-foundations

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