Tech Talk #14 - Skill issue: A guide to Using AI skills with VictoriaMetrics

An engineer in an incident does not have a metrics problem, a logs problem and a traces problem. They have one question, and answering it today means opening three interfaces and retyping the same timestamp, service name and tenant into each one.

Mathias Palmersheim and Michelle Sebek are joined by co-founder Roman Khavronenko to run an AI agent across VictoriaMetrics, VictoriaLogs, VictoriaTraces and vmanomaly, using the twelve Agent Skills and four MCP servers the team publishes. The demo topic comes from a viewer submission. Two paths do the same job and they are not interchangeable: skills are text files that shell out to curl with credentials in a mode-0600 file, MCP servers hand the agent a typed toolset and hold the credentials server-side. The session covers when to reach for each.

It also covers the parts usually left out. The MCP servers ship without client authentication, tool gating is the only safety control, and the agent will be confidently wrong at some point on a live stream. The whole demo runs split screen against the server's own tool-call log, so every answer can be traced back to the call that produced it.

Opens with corrections from #13 https://www.youtube.com/watch, including why Mathias's vmanomaly connection was broken and why vmanomaly now points you at Temporal Envelope and Online MAD instead of Prophet.