Configure Instructions
Add guidance that applies to every AI SRE investigation for the current team.1
Open AI SRE Settings
Open AI & Agents → AI SRE, then select Instructions.
2
Write The Guidance
Describe the systems to check, evidence to prioritize, or investigation practices to follow. Use direct, testable language.
3
Save The Instructions
Save the editor. The guidance applies to future investigations for everyone on the current team.
What To Include
Useful instructions teach AI SRE something specific about your environment or evidence standards.Name the service aliases, environment labels, ownership boundaries, or topology details that aren’t obvious from provider data.
Identify the source of truth for a signal. For example: “Use the payment-api error-rate monitor to establish customer impact; don’t infer impact from worker retry volume.”
State checks that should happen across every investigation. For example: “Compare the alert window with the previous 30 minutes and check deploys to the affected service and its direct dependencies.”
Define what a useful handoff contains. For example: “Separate confirmed facts from open hypotheses and name the missing evidence for every unresolved cause.”
Instruction Scope And Precedence
Rootly can apply guidance at several scopes.
Configure global instructions under AI & Agents → Global → Instructions. See AI Settings for the team-wide AI configuration surface.
Only the matching non-paused investigation rule with the lowest stored position contributes rule-specific instructions. Sorting the rules table doesn’t change that priority, and manual reordering isn’t currently available. Keep overlapping rules consistent, or make their conditions mutually exclusive.
Instructions steer where AI SRE looks and how it reports. They don’t grant permissions, expand connector access, override Private Agent policy, or prove a cause. The investigation still needs current evidence.
Write Effective Instructions
- Name the provider, service, signal, or environment that matters.
- Ask for a comparison or verification that produces evidence.
- Explain ambiguous naming, such as two provider labels that refer to the same service.
- State how to handle uncertainty and what to include in the report.
- Keep team-wide instructions broadly applicable. Put alert-specific guidance in an investigation rule.
- Assert a cause before the investigation starts.
- Tell AI SRE to ignore contradictory evidence.
- Prescribe a production change without a current safety check.
- Depend on one incident’s timestamp, identifier, or temporary state.
- Repeat information already present in every alert payload.
Examples
Evidence Standard
Deployment Correlation
Report Quality
Related Pages
Investigation Rules
Apply guidance to a specific class of alerts and choose when it runs automatically.
Memory
Curate evidence-backed knowledge that AI SRE can retrieve when it is relevant.
Frequently Asked Questions
Do instructions replace connectors?
Do instructions replace connectors?
No. Instructions tell AI SRE what to check, while an AI connector or Private Agent provider supplies the evidence. If the required source isn’t connected or permitted, AI SRE reports the gap.
Should a runbook go in instructions or memory?
Should a runbook go in instructions or memory?
Put a short, broadly applicable investigation practice in instructions. Keep team-specific facts and reusable diagnostic learnings in Memory, and connect the full runbook through a knowledge provider such as Notion, Confluence, or a custom Model Context Protocol (MCP) server.
What happens when a rule conflicts with AI SRE instructions?
What happens when a rule conflicts with AI SRE instructions?
Both pieces of AI SRE guidance are supplied to the investigation. Avoid conflicting wording by keeping team-wide instructions general and rules specific to their alert class.