AI agent to find faults faster at software company InEight

When an app or system goes down, someone has to figure out why. Software company InEight has sharply cut that work with an AI agent from Microsoft, Azure SRE Agent, according to a Microsoft customer story about the company.

The figures are self-reported and selected by the vendor, and there is no independent verification of them.

From two hours to significantly less

According to the customer story, the effort spent investigating incidents, meaning faults and service disruptions, has dropped by 60 percent. The same decline is reported for the time to the first investigation of a fault and for triaging failed builds. Triage means sorting and assessing what needs to be tackled first.

Before the tool, a typical diagnosis took about two hours. Complex cases required three to four hours to gather context and telemetry, meaning measurement data from the systems. Engineers used about ten different data sources and had to bring in specialists from several teams.

Today, 80 percent of incidents are resolved by a single on-call engineer, according to the customer story.

Knowledge gathered in one place

InEight runs a suite of integrated products on Azure, Microsoft's cloud service. The customer story mentions Azure Monitor and Azure SQL Database in this context.

Babji Talluri, Senior DevOps Engineer at InEight, says that having a unified view of the thousands of resources was always a nightmare. He also says it used to take three to four hours to build context, review telemetry and arrive at a meaningful short-term and long-term remediation.

According to Talluri, expert knowledge sat with a handful of senior engineers. InEight is now gathering that knowledge in a central, version-controlled repository.

Faster troubleshooting rather than faster code

Jim Ellerbeck, VP of Technology - DevOps, R&D at InEight, points out that the real benefit of AI is not that it can write code quickly, but that it can find the problem faster.

According to Ellerbeck, Azure SRE Agent lets InEight reason across source code, live telemetry and Azure infrastructure in a single conversation. He calls that transformative for a company with a large suite of integrated products.