Exploring Signals scouts

A scout is a scheduled agent that wakes on its own interval, looks at one PostHog project, decides what's genuinely worth surfacing, and either writes it into the Signals inbox as a report or closes out empty (a real, valid outcome). PostHog ships a fleet of canonical scouts — a cross-product generalist (signals-scout-general) plus per-surface specialists (error tracking, logs, AI observability, experiments, feature flags, session replay, web analytics, surveys, and more). A project may also have custom scouts beyond the canonical fleet — any signals-scout-* skill a team authored (e.g. -brand-mentions, -mcp-feedback) shows up here too, so don't assume a fixed roster: scout-config-list is the authoritative roster for a project. (One caveat: a just-authored scout has no config row until the coordinator's next tick auto-registers one — or until someone registers it via the write-side scout-config-create — so a brand-new scout may briefly be missing from the list.)

This skill helps you understand and explore what a project's scouts are doing and how they're performing — entirely through read-only MCP tools. It is the observability counterpart to the authoring-scouts skill (which teaches writing and tuning) and to the inbox-exploration skill (which covers the inbox reports scouts feed into). (The scout tools were recently renamed from signals-scout-* to scout-*; if a scout-* name comes back unknown, the server may still expose it under the legacy signals-scout-* name — search the tool catalog and call whichever name it returns.)

A scout's output is inbox reports, written 1:1. Scouts list emit_report / edit_report in their allowed_tools and author or edit inbox reports directly; a run's output shows up as emitted_report_ids (reports it authored) and edited_report_ids (reports it updated). The run rows also carry emitted_count / emitted_finding_ids — legacy fields from the deprecated signal-emitting channel (weak emit_signal findings a pipeline consolidated). On a report-channel scout they stay 0 / empty even on a productive run; a non-zero tally means the run came from a scout still on the legacy channel (an old custom scout, or a canonical scout not yet ported) — real output for that run, not noise. When unsure of a scout's channel, check its allowed_tools via skill-get. Never read emitted_count: 0 as "did nothing" — check the report columns and the run summary first.

There are six things you can observe about the fleet, each with its own tool: