Over the past few months, we’ve seen incredible adoption of our AI Investigations and Insights reports. Teams are using them to automate the deep, thoughtful analysis required for complex post-mortems, capacity planning, and performance optimization. These comprehensive reports are fantastic when you need a well-researched, shareable document.
But what about the moments during an investigation? What about the rapid-fire “what if” questions and the quick exploration of hypotheses that happen in the heat of the moment? For that, you need speed and interactivity. You need a partner you can have a real-time dialogue with.
Today, we’re introducing a new, fully interactive way to work with Netdata AI: Real-Time Conversations.
This is a live, stateful conversational interface built from the ground up for the specific needs of troubleshooting. You can now engage in a back-and-forth dialogue with Netdata AI, asking it to pull data, visualize trends, and correlate information on the fly.
Often adding “AI” has meant bolting a chat interface onto existing functionality (a thin wrapper that can answer questions but can’t actually do anything). We consciously took a different path. From the start, Netdata AI was built around deep analytical capabilities: automated root cause analysis, comprehensive investigations that synthesize data across your entire infrastructure and intelligent alert suggestion and configuration. The conversational interface is arriving now, because the insights engine and arsenal of tools are already available.
Generating Live Exhibits
Netdata AI doesn’t just respond with text; it generates what we call Live Exhibits. These are rich, interactive data visualizations—charts, tables, and log snippets—that are created and embedded directly into your conversation.
This is the key to a faster workflow. You don’t have to switch contexts, open new dashboards, or manually search for the data the AI is referencing. The evidence is presented to you, right there in the flow of the conversation.
A Typical Workflow
Imagine you’re investigating a report of a slow API endpoint.
You (starting the conversation):
“Show me the average latency for the
api-gatewayservice over the last 3 hours.”
Netdata AI responds with a Live Exhibit: A real-time chart visualizing the P95 latency for that service is instantly embedded in the chat. You notice a clear spike an hour ago.
You (drilling down):
“Okay, what was the CPU usage on the underlying Kubernetes pods during that spike?”
Netdata AI pulls the data for you: A table appears, listing the pods and their peak CPU usage during the incident window. One pod clearly stands out.
You (forming a hypothesis):
“Show me any error logs from that specific pod around that time.”
Netdata AI delivers the final piece of evidence: A snippet of the relevant logs appears, showing a series of “database connection timeout” errors.
In the span of a minute, you’ve gone from a vague symptom to a clear, evidence-backed root cause, all within a single, continuous conversation.
The Right Tool for the Right Job
Real-Time Conversations are designed to work in concert with our existing AI capabilities, giving you a complete toolkit for any scenario:
- Real-Time Conversations: Use this for the initial, exploratory phase of an investigation. It’s perfect for quick questions, ad-hoc data pulls, and rapidly testing hypotheses.
- AI Investigations & Reports: Once you’ve used the conversation to form a strong hypothesis, trigger a full Investigation to generate a deep, comprehensive report. This leverages the same analytical core, but optimized for thorough, asynchronous analysis that can be shared as the official record for a post-mortem or change request.
AI credits consumption
Just like other Netdata AI functionality, usage is based on AI credits (Reminder: you get 10 monthly complementary credits while on a business subscription, and you can top-up credits yourself based on your needs. You also get 10 free credits on the free trial to experiment with.)
On the conversations window you’ll see a live measure of how many credits the current conversation has consumed.
Short conversations utilize a small fraction of a single credit, while very long and involved conversations can consume more than 1 credit.
How to Get Started
You’ll find the new blue “Conversations” button above the space selectors. Your conversation history is saved, allowing you to pick up an investigation right where you left off.
This functionality is now available for all users on a Business plan or a free trial.