Agentic AI powers the Splunk AI Assistant within the Splunk Observability Cloud interface to help you quickly and easily tap into the health of your applications and infrastructure. Simply asking the AI Assistant your observability questions using natural language does the hard work of querying your environment and returning the relevant information you need to find root cause, triage, troubleshoot, and reduce Mean Time To Resolution (MTTR). The AI Assistant can even generate the SignalFlow you need to create custom charts and dashboards.
In this Splunk Observability Cloud’s AI Assistant in Action series, we will look at how to use the Splunk AI Assistant by digging into some practical, real-world, real-time examples. We’ll explore the specific use cases of:
- Identifying unknown unknowns
- Analyzing and troubleshooting in real-time
- Auditing compliance and cost
- Explaining or providing feedback
- Onboarding new hires or new users of Splunk Observability Cloud
- Observability as Code
This first post will explain how to access the Splunk AI Assistant, and then we’ll learn how to use it to identify unknown unknowns within our service environment.
Accessing the Splunk AI Assistant
You can access the Splunk AI Assistant from Splunk Observability Cloud by selecting the AI Assistant icon located in the upper right corner of the screen:
Selecting this icon opens the interactive window to chat with the AI Assistant. Once the AI Assistant pane is open, you’ll see pre-populated prompts that are a great starting point if you’re new to the AI Assistant:
Here’s an example response for the first prompt, "What can you help me with?”:
As you can see, the AI Assistant can access metrics, traces, and logs in Splunk Observability Cloud. It can also help you analyze detectors, alerts, incidents, and draft SignalFlow.
Identifying Unknown Unknowns
As an engineer, a great way to start the work day is to interrogate the AI Assistant with a question like, “What should I know about my environment?” Whether you’re back in the office after a weekend away, jumping into an on-call rotation, or simply catching up on a recent incident to help troubleshoot, using the AI Assistant to gain quick insight into unknown unknowns is a powerful resource.
Let’s ask a question about one of our environments. We’ll prompt the AI Assistant to tell us something we might not be aware of for one of the service environments we own, the Online Boutique. We’ll ask it to point out interesting or concerning things related to this environment:
Looking at the response, we can see the AI Assistant performs analysis and then identifies that the Payment service has a high error rate. It also identifies common error tags like HTTP 401 status codes and high latency concerns:
We can also see that the AI Assistant analyzed the upstream and downstream dependencies of the services in our environment:
It also made some recommendations based on its findings. It hyperlinked to the services involved, so we can easily investigate those services in detail by moving over to Splunk Application Performance Monitoring for further troubleshooting. In this case, we’re hyperlinked to our Payment service and can explore real-time issues directly in Splunk APM:
My team owns the Payment service, and I know that code changes were recently deployed. A great next step would be to use the AI Assistant to interrogate our system and investigate if this latest release could be causing these high error rates and latency.
Wrap up
To summarize, this first post in our Splunk Observability Cloud’s AI Assistant in Action series focused on using the Splunk AI Assistant to quickly identify unknown unknowns within our environment.
Stay tuned for our next post, in which we’ll use the AI Assistant to analyze and troubleshoot in real time, investigating error rates and latency and comparing deployments and releases.
Want to try out the Splunk AI Assistant for yourself? Start with a 14-day free trial! Already a Splunk Observability Cloud customer? Reach out to your account representative to enable the Splunk AI Assistant!
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