Kubernetes Troubleshooting in Resolve AI

Since its first commit in June 2014, Kubernetes has evolved into the de facto standard for container orchestration, with over 88,000 contributors from more than 8,000 companies spanning 44 countries. Its self-healing and declarative nature promises effortless scaling and high availability. Yet, managing Kubernetes in production is far from straightforward. Just ask any on-call engineer or SRE; troubleshooting production issues often spirals into a frustrating cycle of trial and error.

Many find that a 2 a.m. alert leads them to kubectl, only to find the issue has mysteriously "fixed itself." But not for long. Issues like noisy neighbors, misbehaving add-ons, resource starvation and subtle memory leaks lurk just beneath the surface. Troubleshooting Kubernetes often feels less like solving a puzzle and more like chasing shadows.

What if you could eliminate the strain, guesswork and manual toil? Imagine an autonomous AI agent that not only assists but proactively investigates and performs root cause analysis across your Kubernetes infrastructure and the applications running on it. That’s exactly why we built the AI Production Engineer; to streamline production operations and make on-call stress free.

The Kubernetes Troubleshooting Struggle

While Kubernetes automates a lot, its dynamic and ephemeral nature brings new challenges:

1. Noisy Alerts That Cry Wolf
Kubernetes’ control plane tirelessly adjusts workloads to match the desired state. Minor hiccups like a pod restarting, often trigger alerts that resolve themselves before you even react. The result? Alert fatigue. But buried within that noise, real issues like misconfigured autoscalers or hidden bottlenecks go unnoticed until they snowball into outages.

2. Ephemeral Pods, Lost Context
When pods crash, they take valuable troubleshooting context with them. It’s impossible to attach a debugger in time, and the resource states have already reset. By the time you investigate, critical clues are already gone. It’s like arriving at a crime scene after the evidence has been swept away.

3. The Observability Data Maze
Logs are scattered across nodes, pods, and containers, turning debugging into a frustrating exercise. Kubernetes generates a flood of metrics, but only a small fraction matter for any given alert. Sifting through endless dashboards to find relevant data wastes time and delays resolution, leaving teams overwhelmed by noise instead of focused on solutions.

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How Agentic AI Changes Troubleshooting

Now, imagine a Kubernetes troubleshooting partner that not only pinpoints problems but actively resolves them. Agentic AI from Resolve AI operates as a 24/7 Kubernetes expert that connects the dots, surfaces actionable insights, and automates tedious investigations.

It removes the need to gather data from multiple sources, coordinate calls with incident managers, or escalate to those who’ve “seen this before.” It understands unique and recurring issues and it streamlines resolutions and minimizes operational overhead. It accelerates your response, offers a clear starting point, and instills greater confidence in taking the right actions.

Here’s how it works:

1. Always-On Expertise
Agentic AI doesn’t sleep or tire. When an alert fires, it dives into your cluster, navigating the complexity and presenting clear, actionable insights - often before you even reach for your laptop. By monitoring every alert, it handles the flood of noisy issues that usually lead to alert fatigue, ensuring on-call teams only focus on what truly matters.

In the near future, the AI Production Engineer will go a step further, automatically resolving issues within human-approved boundaries.

2. Knowledge Graphs for Context and Clarity
At the core of Resolve AI is a dynamic knowledge graph that maps your Kubernetes environment. It links pods, nodes, services, and other entities, revealing patterns you might miss. For instance:

• Are pods across namespaces experiencing similar memory spikes?
• Is a specific node overburdened due to unbalanced traffic? The knowledge graph connects these dots, surfacing systemic issues instead of presenting you with isolated symptoms.

3. Noise-Free Analysis Across All Telemetry
Resolve AI transforms your data into actionable clarity by analyzing data from diverse sources like Prometheus metrics, Datadog logs, Kubernetes events, configuration changes, and more. Your data holds immense value but only when it's relevant. Resolve AI excels at parsing and prioritizing change events, resource states, metrics, dashboards, and logs, pinpointing the entries directly tied to an alert. By filtering out irrelevant noise, it delivers a clear and concise narrative of what’s happening, empowering you to focus on solving issues rather than sifting through data.

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Agentic AI in Action

Picture this:

You’re alerted about a pod crash. Instead of wrestling with kubectl or parsing endless logs, the AI Production Engineer steps in:

1. Reconstructs the Event Timeline
It pieces together what led to the crash; be it resource contention, a configuration misstep, or external throttling.

2. Correlates Issues Across the Cluster
Using the knowledge graph, it checks for similar anomalies across pods, nodes, or namespaces.

3. Runs Automated Investigations
Agentic AI tests hypotheses like “Was it an OOM error?” or “Is the pod failing due to a misconfigured startup command?” by executing runbooks automatically.

4. Provides Resolutions
If a resolution is found, the agent suggests it and is poised to act on it (a capability that’s just around the corner). If not, it outlines clear next steps, saving time and effort.

All this happens while you’re grabbing coffee … or better yet, still asleep.

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Why Make It Hard When It Can Be Easy?

Kubernetes is complex, but troubleshooting doesn’t have to be. From day one, Resolve AI transforms the way you manage Kubernetes by leveraging its built-in expertise to eliminate repetitive firefighting, streamline operations, and give you back your nights and weekends.

Instead of scrambling for answers during an outage, you’ll have an agentic AI ally that understands Kubernetes inside and out. It spots patterns, automates investigations, and keeps your cluster humming.

The next time Kubernetes throws you a curveball, let an AI Production Engineer handle the heavy lifting. Your future self will thank you.

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