This is the fifth post in the Splunk Observability Cloud’s AI Assistant in Action series that digs into how to use the Splunk AI Assistant by exploring practical, real-world, real-time examples. In this series, we go into the specific Splunk AI Assistant use cases of:
- Identifying unknown unknowns
- Analyzing and troubleshooting in real-time
- Auditing compliance and cost
- Explaining metrics and providing feedback
- Onboarding new hires or new users of Splunk Observability Cloud
- Observability as Code
If you’d like to start at the beginning of this series, check out our first post: Identifying Unknown Unknowns.
In this fifth post, we’ll explore how the Splunk AI Assistant can help quickly onboard new hires and/or help those who might be new to Splunk Observability Cloud.
Onboarding New Hires
Deep contextual, interpreted, and real-time data isn’t just helpful to experienced engineers - as we saw in our last post, Explaining Metrics and Providing Feedback. Imagine you’re an engineer who has just joined a new company. You’re trying to understand the services and environment your team owns and how everything works together. You can use the AI Assistant to get an understanding of the environment and the data that’s flowing between services. For example, you might want to know what kind of data is being sent to the Payment service in your team’s Online Boutique environment:
From this prompt, the AI Assistant uses log data to identify what’s happening in the Payment service and returns the data types being sent and processed. In the response, we can see details on how the Payment service is processing payment transactions, how HTTP requests are made to the Payment service, order confirmation integration with an email service, and retry mechanisms for payment processing:
Finally, we have a nice summary of what the Payment service does:
This kind of information is super powerful for anyone who is new to the organization and trying to quickly get up to speed on how service architecture and how they work together. Documentation is helpful during onboarding, but the AI Assistant provides real-time, up-to-date information quickly and interactively.
Wrap up
To summarize the use case explored in this post, we’ve used the Splunk AI Assistant to onboard new hires and build familiarity with Splunk Observability Cloud.
In our next post, we’ll learn how to leverage the AI Assistant for Observability as Code by generating scripts that can interact with the Splunk Observability Cloud API. Scripts like these can be expanded to create dashboards, charts, detectors, and more.
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!
Resources
- Previous post in the Splunk Observability Cloud’s AI Assistant Series: Explaining metrics and provid...
- AI Assistant in Observability Cloud
- Splunk’s AI Assistant: Top 7 Use Cases for AI-Driven Observability
- Practical Use Cases for Splunk Observability Cloud’s AI Assistant: Onboarding New Hires and New User...
- Troubleshooting Microservices with Splunk Observability Cloud and the AI Assistant for Observability...
- Splunk Observability Hub
