
Auditing Warehouse View Health
FreeQuickly assess the health of your PostHog materialized views.
Free · Opens the source repo
What Auditing Warehouse View Health does
The Auditing Warehouse View Health skill enables users to conduct a comprehensive audit of their PostHog project's materialized views, which are essentially saved queries within the data warehouse. This skill identifies any failing materializations and flags unused or stale views that may incur unnecessary storage and compute costs. It is particularly useful for users who need to quickly assess the health of their views without diving into complex diagnostics. The skill is designed for data engineers, analysts, and anyone managing data workflows in PostHog, providing a straightforward way to ensure that materialized views are functioning optimally.
When invoked, the skill utilizes the data-warehouse-data-health-issues-retrieve endpoint to gather information about materialized views that are currently failing or degraded. Users can ask specific questions such as "Which of my views are broken?" or "Are any of my materialized views wasting compute?" The skill returns a prioritized report detailing any issues, including the type of error and the specific query that is failing. This allows users to quickly identify and address issues without sifting through raw data.
In addition to identifying failures, the skill can also provide insights into views that are marked as materialized but have not been queried recently, indicating potential candidates for cleanup. However, it is important to note that this skill focuses solely on materialized views and does not address issues related to sources, syncs, or transformations, which are handled by other tools. The audit is read-only, ensuring that users can assess their view health without risk of unintentional changes to their data structures.
When to use it
Use this skill when you need a quick audit of materialized view health in PostHog, especially after schema changes or when dashboards are stale.
When not to use it
This skill is not suitable for diagnosing issues related to data sources, syncs, or transformations; those require different tools.
What you can build with it
Post-Deployment Review
After deploying a new schema, use this skill to quickly check if any materialized views are failing due to the changes.
Cost Optimization
Regularly audit your materialized views to identify and unmaterialize any that are not being used, helping to reduce storage costs.
Dashboard Troubleshooting
When dashboards backed by materialized views are showing errors, run this skill to pinpoint the problematic views.
How to install Auditing Warehouse View Health
View source1. Install with the skills CLI
npx skills add posthog/posthog/auditing-warehouse-view-health --agent claude-code2. Or install it manually
Download the skill folder and drop it into ~/.claude/skills/ for all projects, or .claude/skills/ to scope it to one repo. Restart Claude Code so it picks up the new skill.
Anthropic's agentic coding CLI, and the reference implementation of Agent Skills. Drop a skill folder into ~/.claude/skills and Claude Code loads it automatically whenever a task matches the skill's description. Claude Code docs
Inside SKILL.md
Written by posthogAuditing data warehouse view health
This skill produces a project-wide audit of materialized views (materialized saved queries) in the data warehouse — which ones are failing, and which are materialized but unused. Use it when the user wants a summary of view health, not a deep-dive on one failure.
The same underlying endpoint (data-warehouse-data-health-issues-retrieve) also reports source, sync, batch-export,
and transformation issues. Source and sync health is covered by auditing-warehouse-source-health. Destinations
(batch exports) and transformations are owned by other products — surface them if they appear, but route them to the
relevant team rather than diagnosing here.
When to use this skill
- "Which of my views are broken?" / "Why is this materialized view failing?"
- "Are any of my materialized views wasting compute?"
- Reviewing view health after a HogQL or schema change
- Dashboards backed by materialized views are stale or erroring
Available tools
| Tool | Purpose |
|---|---|
data-warehouse-data-health-issues-retrieve | One-shot: all failed/degraded items across the whole pipeline |
view-list | All saved queries / materialized views with status and latest_error |
view-run-history | Run history for a specific materialized view |
Filter the data-health-issues results to the materialized_view type for this audit. Use view-list when you need
more than the active-failure summary (non-failing views, materialization flags, last-queried info) and
view-run-history to see the run trail for a specific view.
What counts as a view "issue"
From the data-health endpoint, this audit cares about one of the five categories:
type | Trigger | Typical urgency |
|---|---|---|
materialized_view | DataWarehouseSavedQuery.is_materialized=true, status=Failed | Medium |
Each entry includes id, name, type, status, error, failed_at, and url.
The other categories the endpoint returns are out of scope for this skill:
source/external_data_sync→auditing-warehouse-source-healthdestination(batch export) → owned by the batch exports / data pipelines producttransformation(HogFunction) → owned by the CDP / ingestion side
Note the data-health endpoint only reports active failures. For views it doesn't flag:
- Non-materialized views with errors (only materialized views are reported)
- Materialized views that are healthy but unused (costing compute every run) — see Step 4
Workflow
Step 1 — One-shot pull
Call data-warehouse-data-health-issues-retrieve and keep the materialized_view entries.
If there are no view issues, tell the user their materialized views are healthy and stop. Don't invent problems.
Step 2 — Triage failures
Materialized view failures are usually independent of sources — a view failure is a HogQL or data issue in the view
itself (syntax error, missing table reference, type mismatch). For each failing view, surface the error and point
at the offending query. Use view-run-history if the user wants the failure trail.
Step 3 — Present the audit
Render a prioritized report. Don't dump the raw JSON — human-readable:
## Materialized view health — 2 issues
### 🟠 Materialized views (2)
- monthly_revenue — view failed (syntax error in HogQL: 'FORM' instead of 'FROM')
- active_users_30d — view failed (missing table reference)
Both are HogQL issues in the view definitions — independent of your sources. Want me to open one?
Step 4 — Go beyond active failures (when asked)
Unused materialized views:
Call view-list. Materialized views cost storage and compute every run. If any are marked materialized but haven't
been queried lately, surface them as cleanup candidates (the data is available via view-list; unmaterialize via
view-unmaterialize).
Only run this extra check if the user explicitly asks for a broader audit.
Step 5 — Offer the next step
End the audit with a clear hand-off — e.g. "Want me to open monthly_revenue and fix the HogQL?" Never apply fixes
autonomously from an audit; confirm explicitly before editing or unmaterializing a view.
Important notes
- The audit is read-only. Never call destructive tools (e.g.
view-unmaterialize,view-delete) from the audit flow without explicit confirmation. - Empty = healthy. Don't pad an empty audit with hypothetical issues. "No view issues found" is a good answer.
- View failures are usually self-contained. Unlike source failures, a failed materialized view rarely cascades — it's a query problem in that view. Don't imply a broader outage.
- Sources, syncs, destinations, and transformations are out of scope here. They share the data-health endpoint but belong to other audits/products — route, don't diagnose.
Frequently asked questions about Auditing Warehouse View Health
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