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.)

Governed metric first

When the question asks for scout failure rate or cost per run, call posthog:metric-list before the scout tools and look for scout_run_fail_pct or scout_cost_per_run. Run an approved, non-drifted match with posthog:data-catalog-metric-run for the canonical headline. If the user also asks which scouts, runs, or failure modes drive the result, answer the headline first, then use the workflows below for a noncanonical breakdown. If no governed metric matches, say so and label the derived measure noncanonical.