Designing Hindsight Retain and Recall for SRE Incidents
An incident-response system can retrieve the right information and still fail to learn anything. That was one of the design problems behind OpsMind. We wanted an AI SRE agent that could not only recall previous incident experiences while investigating a failure, but also retain the outcome of a resolved incident so that the experience could influence future investigations. The resulting workflow…
OpsMind is an AI-powered SRE agent designed to retrieve relevant historical incident experiences and retain the outcomes of resolved incidents to improve future investigations. Two key operations drive this workflow: Recall, which occurs before diagnosis, and Retain, which happens after resolution. OpsMind gathers current evidence from logs and metrics before querying Hindsight, its memory layer, for historical context.
The recall query includes details such as the incident ID, service, severity, symptoms, current metrics, performance behavior, and previous remediation experiences. This query asks Hindsight to identify incidents with similar symptoms, service behavior, performance problems, errors, resource saturation, and remediation experiences.
Hindsight's asynchronous API retrieves previous SRE incidents with relevant historical context, which is then processed and passed into the diagnosis pipeline. OpsMind ensures the current incident does not appear in the historical results by excluding it. The AI agent prioritizes current logs and metrics over historical information to avoid incorrect automation.
After resolution, OpsMind creates a learning record containing incident details, AI diagnosis, actions taken, outcome, and resolution status. This learning record is then retained in Hindsight, turning the incident into historical organizational knowledge. The memory loop was tested by investigating another incident after retaining INC-008, which OpsMind retrieved as historical context.
This demonstrates a complete memory lifecycle: INC-008 → Resolve → Retain → INC-007 → Recall. The integration also revealed an asynchronous execution issue, highlighting the complexity of implementing such a system.
Written by urgent.news from Dev.to's reporting — not their text. Machine-written — may contain errors; check the original before relying on it.
