Dash0 acquires Polar Signals

Last updated: September 8, 2026

About Skills

Skills are the instructions Agent0 follows for a kind of task. Dash0 ships a set, and your organization can add its own so Agent0 follows your runbooks and conventions.

Agent0 applies skills to do its work: querying span data, building a PromQL query, creating a dashboard. Dash0 ships those, and Agent0 loads them on its own. A custom skill is one your organization writes, so Agent0 also follows the procedures only your team knows.

When to Use a Custom Skill

  • Runbooks: The steps your team takes when a specific service degrades.
  • Conventions: How your environments, datasets, and services are named.
  • Triage order: What to check first, second, and third for a recurring problem.

Create a Custom Skill

Creating, editing, and deleting custom skills requires the Admin role. Members can open the list and invoke the skills in it, but the create, edit, and delete controls are disabled with a tooltip explaining why.

  1. Go to Settings → Agent0 → Skills.
  2. Select Add skill.
  3. Enter a name. Use lowercase letters, numbers, and single hyphens, up to 64 characters. Leave out the leading slash: the name checkout-triage is invoked as /checkout-triage.
  4. Enter a description of when Agent0 should use the skill, up to 1024 characters. The description is required, and Agent0 reads it to decide whether the skill applies, so describe the trigger rather than the mechanism.
  5. Write the instructions. They are required, and there is room for roughly 65,000 characters — about 10,000 words, or 20 printed pages. A runbook does not come close.
  6. Select Save. The skill is enabled from that moment, and Agent0 can invoke it.

To remove a skill, open it from the Skills tab and select Delete.

Verify the Skill Works

Open a Chat thread and type /. The skill appears in the list with its description.

If it does not appear, check the following:

  • The skill is enabled on the Skills tab. Only enabled skills appear.
  • The name is the one you expect. Agent0 lists skills by name.

Invoke a Custom Skill

  • Explicitly: Type / in the Chat composer and select the skill. The reference is highlighted in your draft and in the sent message, and hovering it shows the description.
  • Automatically: Agent0 selects a skill on its own when the description matches the request. For now, auto-invocation is on for every skill.

Auto-invocation is a decision Agent0 makes from the description, not a guarantee. A skill that gets skipped when you expected it usually has a description that does not describe the trigger.

Which Surfaces Custom Skills Apply To

A custom skill belongs to the organization, not to a surface. Every Agent0 run for your organization loads the organization's enabled skills, so auto-invocation works the same in Chat, in Automations, in Slack, and over MCP.

The / picker is a Chat composer feature only. On the other surfaces there is nothing to type / into, so a skill you want Agent0 to reach there needs a description that matches the request — or, in an automation prompt, name the skill in the prompt text.

Enable and Disable a Custom Skill

Each skill is enabled or disabled. No Agent0 run loads a disabled skill, and it does not appear when you type / in Chat, but it stays on the Skills tab with its instructions intact. Disable a skill to retire it without losing its content. A disabled skill still counts toward your organization's limit.

Limits

LimitValue
Skills per organization25
Name1 to 64 characters, lowercase letters and numbers in single-hyphen-separated groups
Description1 to 1024 characters
Instructions1 character to about 65,000 characters (64 KiB)

A custom skill cannot take the name of a skill Dash0 ships. Agent0 identifies a skill by name, so a duplicate would shadow the built-in one. The reserved names include metrics, dashboards, alerts, slack, use-github, use-kubectl, and root-cause-analysis. Saving a skill with a reserved name fails with an error naming the conflict.

Contact support if your organization needs more than 25 custom skills. The cap is not self-service: Dash0 raises it, or removes it for your organization entirely.

Limitations

  • Custom skills are organization-wide. Personal skills are not available for now.
  • A custom skill is a single file written in Dash0. Importing a skill from a repository and uploading multiple files are not available for now.

Further Reading