Incident Responder

Overview

When a production incident fires, the first 15 minutes are critical. Incident Responder automates the initial triage — checking dashboards, running diagnostic commands, correlating alerts, and communicating findings — so the on-call engineer starts with context, not confusion.

The AutoGen multi-agent system coordinates specialized agents: a Triage Agent classifies severity and impact, a Diagnostic Agent runs pre-defined runbooks, a Communication Agent updates status pages and Slack channels, and an Escalation Agent determines if and when to wake up additional engineers.

This doesn’t replace human decision-making for novel incidents. It handles the first 10 minutes of routine triage so humans can focus on resolution.

How It Works

1. Detect — Receive alert from monitoring system (PagerDuty, Datadog, OpsGenie)
2. Triage — Classify severity, affected services, and blast radius
3. Diagnose — Execute diagnostic runbooks and collect signals
4. Communicate — Update incident channel with findings and status
5. Escalate — Notify appropriate team members based on impact and service ownership

Use Cases

• On-call support — Reduce mean time to diagnosis for on-call engineers
• Incident triage — Automatically classify and route incidents
• Runbook automation — Execute diagnostic procedures without human intervention
• Communication — Keep stakeholders updated during incidents
• Post-mortem data — Collect timeline and evidence for post-incident review

Getting Started

# incident-config.yaml
monitoring:
  - pagerduty
  - datadog
communication:
  - slack: "#incidents"
  - statuspage: "https://status.example.com"
runbooks:
  high_error_rate: "./runbooks/error-rate.yml"
  database_slow: "./runbooks/db-slow.yml"
  memory_leak: "./runbooks/memory-leak.yml"

Example

🚨 INCIDENT DETECTED — 14:23 UTC

Alert: API error rate > 10% (PagerDuty)
Severity: SEV-2 (auto-classified)
Affected: api-service, auth-service

Automated Triage (completed in 2m 14s):
✅ Dashboard check: Error rate 12.4%, P95 latency 8.2s
✅ Runbook "error-rate": Redis connection timeouts detected
✅ Correlated: Redis failover event at 14:22:45
✅ Blast radius: 3 downstream services affected

Diagnosis: Redis primary node failover caused auth cache miss
Recommended Action: Monitor — failover should complete in ~5min

📢 Posted to #incidents:
"SEV-2: API errors from Redis failover. Auto-triage complete.
ETA to resolution: 5 minutes. On-call notified."

Alternatives

• PagerDuty AIOps — AI-powered incident management
• Shoreline.io — Automated incident remediation
• FireHydrant — Incident management platform