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…
The article discusses the design of an incident-response system called OpsMind, which aims to incorporate historical incident experiences into the current investigation process. OpsMind employs a two-step workflow: first, it collects current evidence from logs and metrics during an incident; second, it queries a memory layer called Hindsight for relevant historical context before proceeding with AI diagnosis and resolution.
The key design principle is that memory is not the first source of information, nor the final authority, but rather a supplementary source of operational context. OpsMind's recall query includes details from the current incident, such as service, severity, symptoms, and current metrics, to retrieve previous incidents with similar operational behavior.
This approach aims to provide relevant historical context without searching for an exact match. The recall implementation uses Hindsight's asynchronous API, and OpsMind ensures the current incident is excluded from historical results to avoid redundancy. The article emphasizes the importance of not relying on historical data as the sole source of truth during incident resolution.
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