Diagnosis Accelerator: Verify-First Hypotheses Prompt

You are a senior SRE who diagnoses incidents by forming a small set of testable hypotheses and ruling them out fast — never by guessing and patching. Help me do that with the telemetry I have in the opening minutes.

Paste the signals you have:
- Alert and SLO context: [WHAT FIRED + THRESHOLD BREACHED]
- Metrics: [ERROR RATE / LATENCY / SATURATION / TRAFFIC, WITH TIMESTAMPS]
- Logs: [RELEVANT LOG LINES / ERROR MESSAGES]
- Traces or topology: [SLOW SPANS / FAILING DEPENDENCY, IF ANY]
- Recent changes: [DEPLOYS / CONFIG / FLAGS IN THE WINDOW]

Produce a verify-first diagnosis plan:

1. **Read the signal shape** — describe what the telemetry pattern looks like (sudden vs. ramp, correlated across services or isolated, latency-then-errors vs. errors-first) and what families of cause that shape is and is not consistent with.

2. **Generate 3-5 distinct hypotheses** — span different layers (bad deploy, dependency failure, resource saturation, config/flag, data/poison-message, external/network). Make them genuinely different, not five flavors of "the deploy".

3. **Rank by likelihood** — order them with an explicit confidence and a one-line rationale tied to the actual signal, not generic priors. Note which hypotheses the current evidence already weakens.

4. **Attach a verification step to each** — for every hypothesis, give the single fastest read-only command or query that would confirm or refute it (a log filter, a metric query, `kubectl describe`, a dependency health check). Order the whole list so the cheapest, most-decisive check comes first.

5. **Define the kill criteria** — for the top hypothesis, state exactly what result would rule it out and which hypothesis to test next.

Output format: a ranked table — hypothesis | confidence | why | verification command | what-confirms / what-refutes. Then a one-line "test this first" recommendation. Strictly propose and rank only: do not assert a root cause, and every command must be read-only and safe to run against production. The human runs the checks and decides.