From Page to Dossier — Using Agents to Your Advantage

An alert fires at 3am. Your on-call engineer opens their laptop, checks Grafana, tails the logs, traces what deployed in the last hour, diffs the config changes, checks whether an upstream dependency is having its own incident, searches Slack for the last time this happened, and reads half a runbook before they even understand what’s wrong. Forty minutes of context-gathering before a single useful decision gets made. An AI agent can do every one of those steps. Not better than your engineer — but without losing focus at 3am or cutting corners once the investigation gets repetitive. Wire one into your alerting pipeline. When an alert fires, it pulls metrics, correlates logs, traces deployments and config changes, finds related past incidents, reads the runbook, and assembles a dossier that lands alongside the page. Instead of spending forty minutes gathering context, the engineer starts with it. Vendors are starting to ship their own versions of this — Honeycomb Canvas, Dash0, and others. But a vendor’s agent knows about the vendor’s platform. It doesn’t know your deployment pipeline, your change management system, or the five other tools your investigation actually touches. This talk shows how to build your own, wired into your stack, producing a dossier that’s exactly what your organisation needs. Same structure every time, same sections, same layout — because a sleepy engineer at 3am needs a report they can read on autopilot, not a surprise. The agent does not make the call. It gathers the evidence and presents it. Your on-call engineer decides what happens next — because they have taste, judgement, and the kind of contextual understanding you only get from knowing your systems, your team, and your business. The goal isn’t to take the human out of the loop. It’s to stop wasting their judgement on context-gathering and point it at the decision that actually matters. Real demos, real alerts, real monitoring data. You’re not being replaced. You’re arriving with the first forty minutes already done.