OpenSearch Agent Skills bring built-in intelligence to your agentic IDE

Today, we’re launching OpenSearch Agent Skills, a repository of open, composable skills that bring built-in intelligence to developer workflows with OpenSearch, directly inside your favorite agentic IDE. By embedding OpenSearch expertise into the developer’s existing workflow, Agent Skills reduce setup time, eliminate unnecessary tool-hopping, and let teams focus on building rather than configuring.

Developers today can go from idea to working prototype in minutes using agentic IDEs like Claude, Cursor, and Kiro. They can spin up applications, generate APIs, and build end-to-end workflows with a prompt. But whether you’re experimenting with a new idea, building a POC, or running production systems, the experience quickly becomes more complex. For example, improving relevance in OpenSearch still requires deep expertise in query Domain-Specific Language (DSL), ranking logic, and hybrid search tuning. Troubleshooting latency or cluster health issues often means manually piecing together signals from logs, traces, shards, and infrastructure metrics. Even migrations from Elasticsearch or Solr can become complex and time-consuming because of schema conversion, compatibility gaps, and performance optimization challenges. As AI agents become a primary interface for building and operating applications on OpenSearch, a deeper gap emerges. Translating high-level intent into query DSLs, index configurations, and multi-step workflows still requires significant expertise. At the same time, workflows remain fragmented across domains like search, logs, and observability, forcing teams into siloed tooling and disconnected reasoning. The result is repeated trial-and-error, lack of standardized approaches, and slower time-to-value, despite the promise of faster development.

What are Agent Skills?

Agent Skills, developed by Anthropic, are a lightweight, open format for extending AI agent capabilities with specialized knowledge and workflows. They’re supported by a growing number of AI tools and agentic clients, including Kiro, Claude Code, Cursor, VS Code, GitHub Copilot, Codex and others.

At their core, Agent Skills are pre-built intelligence you can call, extend, and reuse. Each skill encapsulates domain knowledge, execution logic with multi-step workflows, and guidance with explainability, so you not only get results but understand how they’re achieved. Instead of stitching together tools and writing custom logic, you can invoke a skill to handle an entire task, from analysis to recommendation to execution.

At launch, OpenSearch Agent Skills introduces three foundational skills designed to address some of the most common and complex developer workflows: Search, Logs, and Solr to OpenSearch Migrations.

Search skill

The Search Skill builds on the foundation introduced by OpenSearch Launchpad, and brings an agentic, intent-driven experience to building and optimizing search applications with OpenSearch. Developers can go from a simple requirement or sample document to a fully working search application in minutes, whether lexical, semantic, hybrid, or agentic, with no

deep OpenSearch expertise required.

What it does:

• Translates natural language requirements or sample data into search configurations.
• Automatically creates index mappings, ingest pipelines, and ML model integrations.
• Sets up keyword, semantic, and hybrid search capabilities out of the box.

Example

Build a semantic search application for product documentation

Output:

• Fully configured OpenSearch index with optimized mappings.
• Integrated embedding models and ingest pipeline.
• Working search experience (API + UI) ready to test and iterate.

The Search Skill builds on the foundation introduced by OpenSearch Launchpad, extending the same capabilities into an agent-native workflow. You can move from idea to a production-ready search application in minutes, eliminating manual setup and accelerating both prototyping and deployment in OpenSearch.

Logs skill

The Log Skill analyzes log data and investigates distributed traces directly within OpenSearch, bringing agentic intelligence to observability workflows. Instead of manually crafting PPL queries or piecing together trace data across services, developers can express their intent and let the skill

handle the complexity.

What it does:

• Queries and analyzes log data using PPL, including error patterns, log volume trends, and anomaly detection.
• Investigates distributed traces, identifying slow spans, error spans, service dependencies, and agent invocations.
• Correlates logs and traces using traceId to surface root causes across the full observability stack.

Example:

Investigate why my service is returning 500s and correlate with recent traces

Output:

• PPL query results surfacing error patterns and log volume anomalies.
• Trace analysis identifying slow or failing spans and service dependencies.
• Correlated view linking log errors to specific trace IDs for faster root cause analysis.

With the Logs Skill, you can move from a vague symptom to a pinpointed root cause in minutes without needing to master PPL syntax or manually navigate trace data.

Solr to OpenSearch migration skill

The Migration Skill streamlines the complex process of migrating from Solr to OpenSearch. Migrations typically involve cluster discovery, compatibility checks, schema translation, data movement, and validation. These steps often require deep expertise and manual coordination. The

Migration skill turns all these steps into a guided, automated workflow.

What it does:

• Discovers and analyzes source clusters, including indices, mappings, and configurations.
• Performs compatibility assessment and highlights breaking changes or required transformations.
• Translates schemas, index settings, and queries into OpenSearch-compatible formats.

Example:

How can I migrate from Solr to OpenSearch?

Output:

• Detailed migration plan with compatibility report and required changes.
• Translated index mappings and configurations ready for OpenSearch.
• Executed data migration pipeline with progress tracking.
• Validation report confirming data integrity and query parity between source and target.

With the Migration Skill, developers can move from a fragmented, high-risk migration process to a structured, automated workflow. This approach provides faster transitions, reduced downtime, and confidence in production readiness.

How it works

OpenSearch Agent Skills are organized as a tree of SKILL.md files, structured by domain category. Rather than one monolithic skill that loads everything, the repo is broken into focused, independently installable skills. Each skill is small enough to stay within a tight context window, but

complete enough to handle real end-to-end workflows.

The top-level structure currently groups skills into three categories:

• Search: opensearch-launchpad for building BM25, semantic, and hybrid search applications from scratch.
• Observability: log-analytics for PPL-based log querying and error analysis, and trace-analytics for distributed trace investigation and span analysis.
• Cloud: aws-setup for deploying to Amazon OpenSearch Service (managed) or Amazon OpenSearch Serverless, with separate manifests for each.

Each skill bundles everything the agent needs: step-by-step workflows, reference docs (like PPL syntax guides and CLI references), and executable scripts that run directly against your cluster.

When you say “build a hybrid search app” or “why is my service throwing 500 errors?”, the agent activates only the matching skill, follows its instructions, and executes the right OpenSearch APIs. It returns results alongside clear explanations of what was configured and why. Because skills load on demand, you can have the full collection installed without bloating your agent’s context window.

We’re continuously expanding the skill library. Categories like Dashboard and Migration are already on the roadmap, with more to come as the ecosystem grows.

Getting started

Getting started with OpenSearch Agent Skills is straightforward. No MCP server or extras are required. Skills are installed using npx skills and work directly with your existing agentic IDE.

Prerequisites:

• Python 3.11+ and uv.
• Docker installed and running.
• AWS credentials configured (optional, for cloud deployment).

Install all skills:

npx skills add opensearch-project/opensearch-agent-skills

Or install a specific skill: (e.g. opensearch-launchpad)

npx skills add opensearch-project/opensearch-agent-skills@opensearch-launchpad --full-depth

npx skills add opensearch-project/opensearch-agent-skills@log-analytics --full-depth

npx skills add opensearch-project/opensearch-agent-skills@trace-analytics --full-depth

npx skills add opensearch-project/opensearch-agent-skills@migration-companion --full-depth

Once installed, simply express your intent to your agent, for example, “I want to build a semantic search app with OpenSearch,” and the agent reads the skill instructions and runs the scripts automatically.

Skills can also be installed to a specific agent (-a claude-code), globally across all projects (-g), or to all detected agents (--all). Explore available skills before installing with --list.

Looking ahead

This is just the beginning. We’re actively expanding the OpenSearch Agent Skills ecosystem with new capabilities across advanced relevance tuning, cost-aware performance optimization, index lifecycle and schema evolution, and cross-domain workflows that unify search, logs, and analytics.

Over time, we see Agent Skills becoming a community-driven knowledge layer across OpenSearch domains where solving a complex problem once means everyone benefits. More importantly, Agent Skills mark a fundamental shift in how developers build and operate with OpenSearch: moving away from manual, fragmented workflows toward intelligent, reusable capabilities that guide, optimize, and accelerate development at every stage.

Get involved

OpenSearch Agent Skills is designed to be an open, evolving ecosystem, and we’re getting started. Here’s how you can participate:

• Try it in your workflow. Install the skills in Claude, Cursor, or Kiro and start interacting with OpenSearch using natural language. Build new applications, investigate issues, or run migrations, and see how far intent-driven workflows can go.
• Build and extend skills. Agent Skills are intentionally modular and extensible. Create your own skills to encode domain-specific workflows, internal best practices, or repeatable operational playbooks. Whether it’s a custom relevance tuning flow or a specialized observability pipeline, your contributions can become reusable intelligence for others.
• Contribute to the ecosystem. We welcome contributions across all levels, from improving documentation and fixing bugs to adding entirely new skills. If you’ve solved a complex problem with OpenSearch, consider turning it into a skill and contribute to the Git repo.
• Share feedback and ideas. Let us know what worked, what didn’t, and what capabilities you’d like to see next, whether it’s deeper integrations, new domains, or more advanced automation.
• Join the conversation. Engage with the OpenSearch community through GitHub discussions, community forums, and working groups. Collaborate with others building similar workflows and help define the future of agent-driven search and observability.

With OpenSearch Agent Skills, we’re moving toward a world where developers don’t only use tools but use shared intelligence. If that resonates with you, we’d love for you to be part of the journey.

Star and get involved in the OpenSearch Agent Skills repo. Join the conversation on the OpenSearch community forum and connect with us in the OpenSearch Slack channel.

Acknowledgments

We would like to extend our sincere gratitude to the following contributors for their valuable contributions to this project Arjun kumar Giri, Sarat Vemulapalli, Chenyang Li, Fen Qin, Janelle Arita, Kaituo Li, Krishna Kondaka, Owais Kazi, Peter Zhu and Zhichao Geng. Your dedication, expertise, and collaborative spirit have been instrumental in making this project successful. Thank you for your time and contributions.

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