Use SRE Agent

Once you've set up the SRE Agent, you can start using it to analyze your environment and investigate incidents. This guide provides practical tips and best practices for getting the most out of your SRE Agent.

Usage tips

Follow these best practices to get optimal results from your SRE Agent:

Time range considerations

The SRE Agent is designed to prioritize live analysis and typically defaults to searching for events, issues, and entities within the last 24 hours. If you want to analyze something older, specify a targeted time window for analysis.

Query optimization

The agent uses tools designed to convert natural language into NRQL queries, which you can then review and run in the query builder. The SRE Agent is designed to analyze telemetry data and is not currently intended or designed to perform source code review or source code analysis. When referencing long conversations, limit ambiguous pronoun usage to help improve the accuracy of the results.

Always review suggestions carefully

Agents may not always act as you intend. For example, an agent may make a suggestion or initiate a process that it deems reasonable, but that may not align with what you had in mind. Due to this, we have incorporated a human-in-the-loop (you) for certain decision making in the SRE Agent design and provide configurable controls for SRE Agent access and permissions for more automated tasks. It is important for you to review suggestions carefully and validate those suggestions and next steps for your own context and circumstances.

New Relic AI Knowledge with the SRE Agent

Connect New Relic AI Knowledge to the SRE Agent so its answers draw on your team's own documents, not just general knowledge. Once connected, the agent searches your connected content during every investigation.

With New Relic AI Knowledge enabled, you can:

• Connect Confluence retros, postmortems, runbooks, and custom files (PDFs, CSVs, text files) so the agent's answers reflect your team's actual practices.
• Find the past incident that matches what you're seeing now, the steps that fixed it, and the team that handled it—so you spend less time investigating from scratch.
• Ask questions in plain language, such as "What are the standard triage steps for this alert?" or "Show me the runbook for a database connection limit exceeded error," and get an answer drawn directly from your own documentation.
• Schedule regular content updates so the agent always has access to your most current documents.

For setup instructions and supported connectors, see New Relic AI Knowledge.

Next steps