The least exciting part of an operations or SRE role is often the manual, repetitive task of generating reports. It’s the Monday morning scramble to summarize weekly infrastructure health for the team, or the end-of-quarter push to build a capacity planning document. This is boilerplate work that pulls you away from critical engineering tasks.
We believe that if a process is repeatable, it should be automated.
That’s why we’re introducing Scheduled AI Investigations and Insights. This new capability builds directly on our existing AI tools, allowing you to set your most important analyses on a recurring schedule. It’s like setting up a cron job for your infrastructure reporting, letting your Co-SRE do the heavy lifting for you.
Until now, Netdata AI features like Custom Investigations have been powerful for reactive troubleshooting. When an issue arises, you can ask a detailed question and get a deep analysis back in minutes.
With scheduling, we’re adding a proactive dimension. Instead of waiting for a problem to occur, you can have Netdata AI constantly looking for trends, optimization opportunities, and potential issues before they escalate. It’s the difference between analyzing an incident after the fact and getting a report that helps prevent one from happening in the first place.
How it Works
The scheduling functionality is a natural extension of the existing AI Insights workflow. You can schedule any of our pre-built reports or your own custom investigations.
- Choose what you want to schedule: Navigate to the “Insights” tab and select a pre-built report (like “Weekly Infrastructure Summary”) or start a “New Investigation” with a custom prompt.
- Set the Schedule: Alongside the “Generate” button, you’ll now see a “Schedule” option. Here, you can define the cadence for your report: daily, weekly, or monthly, and specify the exact time you want it to run.
- Receive the Report: At the scheduled time, Netdata AI will run the investigation and deliver the complete, detailed report to your email and the Insights tab.
Practical Use Cases You Can Set Up Today
Here are a few examples that show how to use scheduling to automate common engineering tasks.
Example 1: The Monday Morning Health Summary
Start the week with a clear, data-driven overview of your infrastructure’s health from the previous seven days.
To Schedule:
- Report Type: Infrastructure Summary
- Time Duration: Last 7 days
- Schedule: Every Monday at 9:00 AM (Repeats weekly)
This ensures your team starts the week on the same page, aware of any creeping trends or notable events before the daily rush begins.
Example 2: The Monthly Performance Optimization Report
Subtle performance degradations are hard to spot day-to-day. A monthly automated analysis can surface these hidden inefficiencies in your applications and infrastructure.
To Schedule:
- Report Type: Performance Optimization
- Time Duration: Last Month
- Schedule: The 1st of every month at 10:00 AM (Repeats monthly)
This helps you proactively identify services that may need refactoring or more resources, leading to better performance and more efficient cost allocation.
Example 3: Automated SLO Conformance Reporting
Manually tracking and reporting on Service Level Objectives is tedious. If your SLOs are defined by specific metrics, you can automate the conformance checks.
To Schedule:
-
Report Type: New Investigation
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Investigation Prompt:
Generate an SLO conformance report for the 'user-auth' and 'payment-processing' services. - For 'user-auth', our SLA is 99.9% uptime and an average API latency below 200ms. - For 'payment-processing', our SLA is 99.99% uptime and an average transaction processing time below 500ms. Analyze the metrics for these services over the last 7 days and report on their conformance to these SLAs. Include any breaches and highlight periods of high latency or error rates. -
Schedule: Every Monday at 10:00 AM (Repeats monthly)
This keeps stakeholders informed with consistent, data-driven reports without the manual effort.
These new scheduling capabilities make your Co-SRE an even more powerful teammate, capable of not just reacting to incidents but proactively monitoring and reporting on the long-term health of your systems.
How to Schedule Your First Report
Scheduling is now available for all users with access to Netdata AI.
From the Insights Tab: Navigate to the “Insights” tab and either select a pre-built report template or click “New Investigation.” After crafting your prompt, click the “Schedule” button to configure the frequency.
We are continuously working on expanding this feature. Expect to see more advanced scheduling options and new destinations for your reports—like Slack and webhooks—in the near future. The goal is to make proactive analysis a seamless, automated part of your workflow.
This functionality is now available for all users on a Business plan or a free trial.
Stop the manual reporting scramble. Start automating your analysis so you can focus on what matters most.