Because many of our design partners and early testers use Teams, we’ve prioritized making Aptible AI usable for them as well. Now the entire universe of Teams users can install Aptible AI to help their on-call engineers investigate and resolve production issues 😄

Aptible AI is now available in Slack AND Microsoft Teams

Here’s how it works:

• You can now install Aptible AI in your Teams app either directly from the Teams store page or through the Aptible AI Web UI. From there, you can download the Aptible AI app package for sideloading if needed (see screenshot below). It also links to the setup documentation for Teams if needed.

  

  
  

• Please note that some behavior will be a little different in Teams than it is in Slack. For example, rather than reacting to a message with 👀, the Agent will let you know it’s working on with a “One moment…” message. Once it has a response ready, it will update that message with its response.

  

In order to improve Aptible AI’s accuracy with regard to Notion documentation, we’ve made a few changes to the Notion integration. There is now less delay between when a change is made in your docs and when the change is reflected in answers from Aptible AI, allowing users to have quicker access to the most up-to-date information. Read more about these updates and other general improvements below.

Notion integration updates:

The notion integration updates cover two major areas: easier setup and access to more up-to-date information. Here’s how it works:

• Notion takes a while to index, so the integration setup process has been improved. Aptible AI will now send one message when the integration is created and a later message when the integration is actually ready to use.

• Because Notion doesn’t have a search API, the original integration involved intaking everything from notion into a third party tool in order to search it. Aptible AI is now able to get the data directly from Notion, allowing for faster retrieval and enabling a self-hosted option for the customers that need it.

Other improvements

• We fixed a bug where large Slack workspaces with many users were occasionally exceeding Slack’s rate limit, causing an error.

• We fixed a bug where the Agent was unable to find Notion tools if the organization had more than one Notion instance.

• We improved the formatting of notifications from Aptible AI to make them easier to read and to add links back to sources when applicable.

This week, we’re excited to share that Aptible AI now supports Confluence as a documentation integration. Now you can ask Aptible AI to search for runbooks, postmortems, or previous incidents from any of your resources in Confluence.

About the Confluence integration:

By adding support for Confluence, Aptible AI can now help more organizations to find the information they need faster. Here’s how it works:

• Right now, the integration is with pages and cloud only. In the future, it will be able to access custom content and databases as well.

• Aptible AI will search Confluence when applicable to answer your question, or you can ask it to directly search Confluence for something specific by using slash commands as seen below.

  

Other improvements

• We’ve further improved the initial setup experience, clarifying the steps remaining to install the Slack app, connect your integrations, and configure your OpenAI key.

  

  
  

• You’ll receive a notification from Aptible AI when a new integration has been set up with tips for how to use it and a link to the documentation.

  

  
  

• General documentation updates make it easier to get started.

This week, we’ve tackled two important improvements for Aptible AI integrations: logging and configuration.

What’s new with integrations:

Both of the updates below address the need for efficient and useful integrations between Aptible AI and your tooling. The new log searching agent alleviates the pain of having to manually sift through logs to find patterns or anomalies. Before this update, the agent could pull logs and present them in chat, but the new searching agent takes it a step further and provides more thoughtful and useful information about the logs.

We’ve also improved the integration configuration process, making it easier to set up, edit, and remove integrations directly from the web UI.

Here’s how it works:

New log searching agent: we’ve added a new logging agent that can use Papertrail to search logs. The agent has a running query that consists of some search terms and a time range and has access to some tools (restart, add, remove, jump) that let it alter the search terms and time range. It runs a loop that calls these tools, looks at results, and decides to either make another tool call to get more information or present a final answer back to Slack based on what it found.

New UI page for integrations: There’s a new Integrations page (under Settings) in the web UI that allows for adding, editing, and removing integrations as well as adding, editing, and removing custom queries within an integration. Each integration type has its own form with the details specific to that integration. This previously had to be done only within the Slack app page.

One major challenge that comes with building an AI agent is that its response quality is dependent on the quality of the data that it’s given. As a result, ensuring high quality responses from Aptible AI has been a journey, but we’ve made some big steps forward over the past few weeks.

Here’s what’s new:

Bot response quality updates

When your on-call engineers rely on accurate information to investigate and resolve incidents as quickly as possible. To ensure that Aptible AI provides the most relevant and helpful information that it can from your data sources. Here’s how we’ve improved Aptible AI’s responses:

• Self-rating: we’re now using AI to quantify how useful the most recent tool call results are to resolving the question that was asked. This self-rating system helps Aptible AI to choose tools and identify stopping criteria when searing for the correct answer.

  

• Links to sources: previously, when the bot would return a Grafana or Datadog dashboard, it would only embed the dashboard in its response. Now the response also includes the link to the source for easy access to further investigation if needed.

  

• Quicker responses: we’ve made adjustments to the bots data fetching that allow it to return a response faster by only grabbing relevant data.

Other improvements:

• UI update: We’ve improved the readability of long, complex conversations in the Threads tab of the Web UI so that it’s easier to understand the human messages vs. the bot’s messages
  
  

  

  
  
  

• New logging assistant: Improved usefulness of logging interactions by creating a standalone logging assistant that’s better at finding the specific section of logs that you need based on the incident

Aptible AI has come a long way in just a few short weeks.

Everything we’ve built has been inspired by the SRE teams we’ve spoken with, and this particular feature was developed in response to a few common problems. Specific and in-depth knowledge of certain systems typically resides with a few key engineers, making on-call difficult for anyone who may be less familiar with those systems (and leading to those tenured engineers getting pulled in to every incident). This generally leads to high stress and longer time to resolution.

To address that problem, Aptible AI now offers suggestions for next steps.

Suggested Next Steps

On-call engineers aren’t always confident about what to do next, either because of the high stress situation or because of a lack of knowledge about the affected services. Ask Aptible AI, “what should I do next?” and it will give you smart next step suggestions during an incident. Here’s how it works:

• Aptible AI has access to your runbooks and, with time, learns how you typically handle incidents by observing your team’s interactions and troubleshooting steps. Based on that information, it can provide suggestions on what you could try out next.

• From Slack, you can choose (and execute) your next course of action using Aptible AI.

  

Other improvements

• Single tenancy option for high security/compliance companies

• Improved bot response times and increased tool choice accuracy

• Improved support for:

  • Datadog

  • InfluxDB

  • Grafana

  • Sentry

  • PagerDuty

  • Papertrail

Every organization's infrastructure and needs are unique and complex. Incident response tools rarely account for your particular use cases and tools, often providing more guidance around process than actual assistance. If you need to investigate an incident by searching logs or metrics from your org's specific databases, you still have to do that manually, tracking down the right scripts to run or combing through thousands of lines of logs.

To speed things up, we developed a way for Aptible AI to integrate with your custom tools so that you can automate repetitive tasks, even the ones that are highly specific to your business.

Custom integrations

Engineers often waste time trying to track down the correct scripts to run to retrieve the information they need from log and metric providers or other internal tooling. We built support for custom tooling so that you can tell Aptible AI when to run your scripts for you. Here’s how it works:

• When you set up your integrations in chat, you can implement your custom integration in one of two ways:

  • A lightweight PubSub interface leveraging Redis as the intermediary

  • A websocket-based “safe” proxy interface modeled after Google’s implementation

• You ask questions in natural language and Aptible AI will make the appropriate queries to your log and metric providers

• Results will be returned directly in Slack, improving shared context and speeding up root cause analysis

  

Incident investigation and resolution occurs all over the place; sometimes there’s multiple chats and threads going on at the same time as a Slack huddle or a Zoom call, and it becomes overwhelming trying to keep up with what’s been done so far. It’s even harder to summarize all the findings, gather them into a single source, update runbooks, and learn from every incident…

That's why we built Incident Tracking and a new Web UI so that you can drill down into each incident, both as it's occurring and after it's resolved.

Incident tracking

Incident Tracking means Aptible AI can provide ongoing, updated summaries for all stakeholders directly within chat. Then it takes those learnings and records them in a Web UI so that your team can drill down into common time sinks, tools that you use most, most frequent root causes, and more. Here’s how it works:

• Aptible AI proactively participates in incident investigation, monitoring everything that’s happened within your Slack thread

• It provides up-to-date summaries for anyone who’s new to the incident so they can read what’s been done so far

• Once the incident is resolved, Aptible AI records all the information in an incident dashboard so that your team can drill down into what incidents are most common, how they’re being resolved, and where the most time is being spent

  

Thanks to the help of our design partners, we’ve been able to create an early iteration of the Aptible AI agent, focused on tackling complex, multi-faceted problems in incident response and system management. Aptible.ai isn’t just a chatbot; it’s a sophisticated system of agents, LLMs, and integrated training and research tools that all work together to provide proactive, expert assistance in real-time. 

Let's dive into the exciting developments that are shaping Aptible.ai into an indispensable tool for engineering teams.

Fast and comprehensive information retrieval

Use Aptible.ai to improve your document search efficiency and improve overall team productivity. Our focus on creating excellent search capabilities includes several key features so far:

• Background and bulk indexing

• Generic document indexing API that supports various document types, including PDFs

• Google Search fallback

• Notion indexing

Fit Aptible AI into any of your existing workflows

We’ve designed Aptible.ai to be more than just a Slack integration (although you can certainly do that too), allowing developers to use the Agent wherever they choose:

• Multiple Slack channels with configurable assistants

• Dynamic SlackBot ID management and permalink storage

• Direct responses to Sentry and PagerDuty alerts in Slack

Easily troubleshoot and improve Aptible AI performance 

To enhance transparency and facilitate troubleshooting, we've implemented the following logging and monitoring capabilities:

• Comprehensive request and access logging

• Logging of all exceptions from the message stream

This progress represents a significant step forward in our mission to provide support to SRE teams during an incident and to help them improve their incident response processes in the future. As always, we welcome your feedback and look forward to continuing our journey of innovation together.

Stay tuned for more updates as we continue to refine and expand Aptible.ai's capabilities!