A tale of two incident responses: How our AI assistant found the root cause 3.5x faster

Grafana Labs recently demonstrated the effectiveness of their AI-powered tool, Grafana Assistant Investigations, which found the root cause of an incident 3.5 times faster than their on-call engineering team. This AI tool, now available in public preview for Grafana Cloud users, analyzes observability data such as metrics, logs, traces, and profiles to identify anomalies and provide actionable recommendations for incident resolution. During an incident caused by an AI-generated SQL query that led to database saturation, the Assistant Investigations tool ran parallel investigations with specialized agents, accurately pinpointing the problem and suggesting remediation before the human team completed their analysis. This incident highlights the growing role of AI in accelerating incident response and understanding complex systems, with AI tools complementing rather than replacing human engineers by providing data-backed insights and reducing response time. Grafana's approach emphasizes human-in-the-loop interactions, ensuring that AI assists in decision-making while maintaining transparency and control, ultimately enhancing productivity and system comprehension in a rapidly evolving tech landscape.