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AI for Incident Response

5 min read
SreDevops

Sre

AI finds correlations. You decide causation. Fast RCA still needs human pattern-matching.

Devops

AI drafts status updates. You own accuracy and tone. Don't delegate customer comms.

AI for Incident Response

TL;DR

  • AI can correlate metrics, logs, and changes to suggest root cause. It accelerates triage. It doesn't replace judgment.
  • Use AI for: searching logs, drafting status updates, finding similar past incidents. Don't use it for: final RCA, customer communication, or blame.
  • War rooms are high-stakes. AI as copilot, not pilot.

When the site is down, speed matters. AI can surface relevant data faster than a human clicking through dashboards. It can also send you down rabbit holes. Your job is to use it without being led astray.

What AI Helps With

  • Log and metric search. "Find errors containing X in the last hour." AI writes the query, you interpret the results.
  • Change correlation. "What deployed in the last 24h?" AI can cross-reference. Useful for "did we break it?" checks.
  • Similar incident lookup. "We've seen this error before." AI searches past postmortems and tickets. Saves time.
  • Status update drafting. "Draft a customer-facing update: we're investigating, ETA 30 min." AI generates; you edit for accuracy and tone.

What AI Shouldn't Do in a War Room

  • Declare root cause. AI suggests. Humans confirm. Wrong RCA leads to wrong fix and repeat incidents.
  • Send external comms. AI can draft. You must verify facts. One wrong "we've resolved it" when you haven't is a reputation killer.
  • Make rollback decisions. "Should we roll back?" depends on risk, blast radius, and business context. AI has none of that.
  • Replace runbooks. AI can retrieve runbook steps. It shouldn't invent new ones mid-incident.

Practical Workflow

  1. Triage: AI surfaces likely contributors (metrics, logs, changes). You narrow the list.
  2. Investigate: AI helps with queries and past incident search. You build the story.
  3. Communicate: AI drafts internal and external updates. You approve and send.
  4. Postmortem: AI can summarize timeline and suggest action items. You own the narrative and accountability.

Manual process. Repetitive tasks. Limited scale.

Click "With AI" to see the difference →

Quick Check

What remains human when AI automates more of this role?

Do This Next

  1. Add an AI assistant to your next incident drill. Use it for log search and similar-incident lookup. Debrief: did it help? What would you do differently?
  2. Create a war-room prompt template: "We have [symptom]. Search logs for [X], metrics for [Y]. Find similar incidents." Pre-write it. Use it when the real thing hits.