Core Skills

Skill 48 of 156

AWS Investigation

Investigates what is happening in an AWS account from evidence already recorded there.

2 minutes · 540 words · 3 sections

Install

$ npx skills add aws/agent-toolkit-for-aws --skill aws-investigation

$ npx skills add aws/agent-toolkit-for-aws

» /plugin marketplace add aws/agent-toolkit-for-aws

The first command installs just this skill, by the name in its SKILL.md; the second installs the whole repository.

An investigation answers a question about what an AWS account is doing, and every claim in the answer must come from something you read: a deployed artifact, a service’s own log record, or a query result. Inference from names, descriptions, the newest stored version or one service’s view of another is a lead, never evidence.

Pick the reference

Read the reference that matches the question before you start; most investigations need more than one.

The question is about	Read
What a deployed system currently does, serves or executes: live configuration, feature flags, parameters, which code runs, reproducing a code path’s query, or a first data route that is blocked	references/deployed-artifacts.md (opens in a new tab)
A request, alarm or incident that spans several services: tracing one request, counting failed requests, deciding where an event was lost	references/multi-service-logs.md (opens in a new tab)
Facts in the account’s data: finding where data lives, exact counts and breakdowns, filtering, joining or exporting records, the rules behind failed or unmatched records	references/data-investigation.md (opens in a new tab)
Whether a finding is complete and a root cause holds: searching every region and scope, paginating before counting, coverage of a date range, one entity vs the whole affected population, consistency of the root cause, whether a runbook fixes the cause, answering the user’s own question	references/completeness-and-root-cause.md (opens in a new tab)

Rules for every investigation

Explore before you give up. Assume the credentials are the intended environment. Treat unfamiliar or internal terms (service nicknames, airport-code regions such as PDX = us-west-2, IAD = us-east-1) as search hints: list resources, log groups and data stores in the likely regions and search for the identifiers in the request before saying something cannot be done.
Separate evidence from inference. Keep a short provenance note per claim (claim <- artifact, record or query). Label anything you did not read as a hypothesis or UNVERIFIED, with the routes you tried.
Count exactly. Use aggregate queries run in the engine, scoped to exactly what was asked, and report unique entities separately from raw records.
Quote, don’t paraphrase. Give identifiers, field values, error codes and messages exactly as the source produced them, including null and empty values.
Finish the task. Produce every requested artifact (files, tables, plans), and state the assumptions you made in the final answer.

Closing checklist

Before submitting your analysis:

Have you searched all relevant regions and scopes?
Have you paginated through all results, and said which part of the requested range has data?
Have you verified the scope of failures (entity-specific vs fleet-wide, the whole affected population)?
Does your root cause fit all the facts you found?
Have you labelled every mechanism you could not confirm as unverified, and reported a missing component as a defect only if it was meant to exist?
Did your claims about live configuration come from the deployed artifact, not the latest stored version (deployed-artifacts.md (opens in a new tab))?
For a request that crosses services, did you read each service’s own logs and place the failure boundary per event (multi-service-logs.md (opens in a new tab))?
Have you answered the user’s specific question directly?
Before you finish, have you reread your conclusion against each piece of evidence you collected and removed any statement that contradicts it?
Have you removed any contradictions between your findings and recommendations, and checked each runbook option against the confirmed cause?

About this skill

Trigger

Investigates what is happening in an AWS account from evidence already recorded there. Not for capturing new data from running code (snapshots of function arguments on a live service, Dynamic Instrumentation), questions answered from the CloudWatch Omni context graph or Application Signals service map, or building or changing infrastructure. Covers reading deployment records instead of the newest stored version (completed AppConfig deployments, the version an alias points to, a stack's current template), following a request through every service's own logs (exact per-layer fields, unique failed requests in an alarm's breach window, failure boundary per event), and answering questions from the account's data (exact counts and breakdowns, coverage of the requested range, exact filters and joins, the rule behind failed or unmatched records, verbatim values). Use to triage an alarm, error spike or failed request, trace a request across services, or count, break down, extract or join records.

The verbatim description from this skill’s front matter — the string an agent matches on to decide whether to load it.

Also published for: Alternate — collapsed into this chapter because the copies are the same skill.
Source: skills/core-skills/aws-investigation/SKILL.md

Colophon for this issue

Colophon

How this issue was made

Source

github.com/aws/agent-toolkit-for-aws, branch main, last pushed 8 November 2026.

Licence

Apache-2.0 — the text of every skill is reproduced unmodified, frontmatter included, under the upstream licence.

Discovery

156 skills found by walking the repository tree for SKILL.md, not by matching a directory convention. 22 distinct layouts observed: plugins/aws-agents-for-devsecops/skills/*/SKILL.md, plugins/aws-agents/skills/*/SKILL.md, plugins/aws-core/skills/*/SKILL.md, plugins/aws-startup-advisor/skills/*/SKILL.md, skills/core-skills/*/SKILL.md, skills/specialized-skills/analytics-skills/*/SKILL.md, skills/specialized-skills/aws-marketplace-skills/*/SKILL.md, skills/specialized-skills/customer-communications-skills/*/SKILL.md, skills/specialized-skills/database-skills/*/SKILL.md, skills/specialized-skills/ec2-skills/*/SKILL.md, skills/specialized-skills/end-user-computing-skills/*/SKILL.md, skills/specialized-skills/media-services-skills/*/SKILL.md, skills/specialized-skills/migration-and-modernization-skills/*/SKILL.md, skills/specialized-skills/networking-and-content-delivery-skills/*/SKILL.md, skills/specialized-skills/operations-skills/*/SKILL.md, skills/specialized-skills/quantum-computing-skills/*/SKILL.md, skills/specialized-skills/resilience-skills/*/SKILL.md, skills/specialized-skills/security-and-identity-skills/*/SKILL.md, skills/specialized-skills/serverless-skills/*/SKILL.md, skills/specialized-skills/storage-skills/*/SKILL.md, skills/specialized-skills/system-table-skills/*/SKILL.md, skills/specialized-skills/web-and-mobile-development/*/SKILL.md.

Duplicates collapsed

44 mirror copies folded into their canonical skill — republished for Alternate. Copies match on content hash and on position once a leading per-agent prefix is stripped, because the same skill is routinely shipped under a dozen agent directories with a dozen different hashes.

Issue colours

Resolved from a curated brand profile — hue 65°, chroma 0.174. Two accent tones are generated per issue and each is proven against its own ground before it ships: a single accent that passes AA on both light and dark paper is arithmetically impossible.

Heading repairs

1 repair applied to this skill so the document has one h1 and no skipped levels:

Removed “AWS Investigation”, a leading h1 that duplicated the skill title.

Spec compliance

Every skill satisfies the Agent Skills specification’s frontmatter rules.

Images

Images inside a skill come from the upstream repository. Where the author gave no alternative text we mark the image decorative rather than inventing a description — a plausible caption we made up is worse than none for the reader who depends on it.

Marketplace

A plugin manifest is published at .claude-plugin/marketplace.json by Amazon Web Services, declaring 5 plugins. It is read for editorial metadata only — never as the skill index, which is always the repository tree.

Signal

Install counts come from skills.sh. They measure downloads, not quality, and an unranked repository is not an unread one.

Agent surfaces

The whole issue is available as one markdown document at /aws/agent-toolkit-for-aws.md, and each skill at its own .md URL.

Publication

Set by Skills Docs from the source repository. Body text is Literata at the reader’s chosen size and measure; code is Geist Mono. Nothing on this page was written by us except this paragraph.

Pick the reference

Read the reference that matches the question before you start; most investigations need more than one.

The question is about	Read
What a deployed system currently does, serves or executes: live configuration, feature flags, parameters, which code runs, reproducing a code path’s query, or a first data route that is blocked	references/deployed-artifacts.md (opens in a new tab)
A request, alarm or incident that spans several services: tracing one request, counting failed requests, deciding where an event was lost	references/multi-service-logs.md (opens in a new tab)
Facts in the account’s data: finding where data lives, exact counts and breakdowns, filtering, joining or exporting records, the rules behind failed or unmatched records	references/data-investigation.md (opens in a new tab)
Whether a finding is complete and a root cause holds: searching every region and scope, paginating before counting, coverage of a date range, one entity vs the whole affected population, consistency of the root cause, whether a runbook fixes the cause, answering the user’s own question	references/completeness-and-root-cause.md (opens in a new tab)

Rules for every investigation

Explore before you give up. Assume the credentials are the intended environment. Treat unfamiliar or internal terms (service nicknames, airport-code regions such as PDX = us-west-2, IAD = us-east-1) as search hints: list resources, log groups and data stores in the likely regions and search for the identifiers in the request before saying something cannot be done.
Separate evidence from inference. Keep a short provenance note per claim (claim <- artifact, record or query). Label anything you did not read as a hypothesis or UNVERIFIED, with the routes you tried.
Count exactly. Use aggregate queries run in the engine, scoped to exactly what was asked, and report unique entities separately from raw records.
Quote, don’t paraphrase. Give identifiers, field values, error codes and messages exactly as the source produced them, including null and empty values.
Finish the task. Produce every requested artifact (files, tables, plans), and state the assumptions you made in the final answer.

Closing checklist

Before submitting your analysis:

Have you searched all relevant regions and scopes?
Have you paginated through all results, and said which part of the requested range has data?
Have you verified the scope of failures (entity-specific vs fleet-wide, the whole affected population)?
Does your root cause fit all the facts you found?
Have you labelled every mechanism you could not confirm as unverified, and reported a missing component as a defect only if it was meant to exist?
Did your claims about live configuration come from the deployed artifact, not the latest stored version (deployed-artifacts.md (opens in a new tab))?
For a request that crosses services, did you read each service’s own logs and place the failure boundary per event (multi-service-logs.md (opens in a new tab))?
Have you answered the user’s specific question directly?
Before you finish, have you reread your conclusion against each piece of evidence you collected and removed any statement that contradicts it?
Have you removed any contradictions between your findings and recommendations, and checked each runbook option against the confirmed cause?

AWS Investigation

Pick the reference

Rules for every investigation

Closing checklist

About this skill

Trigger

Colophon

AWS Investigation

Pick the reference

Rules for every investigation

Closing checklist

Appendix 48.1–48.4

ReferencesMarkdown · 4 files

About this skill

Trigger

Colophon

Appendix 48.1–48.4

ReferencesMarkdown · 4 files