Introduction

This guide provides practical strategies for getting the most accurate and comprehensive results from AI-powered Alert analysis. While Copilot’s PRC agent automatically gathers relevant context and evidence, your operational knowledge and investigative guidance can significantly enhance the analysis quality and speed up resolution times.

These best practices help you leverage your domain expertise to guide AI investigations, ensuring thorough coverage of complex scenarios and more precise root cause identification.

Best Practices for PRC Investigations

The PRC agent automatically gathers relevant context and evidence during investigations. However, your insights and domain knowledge can significantly improve the analysis quality. Here’s how to get the most out of your investigations.

Provide Context Upfront

  • If you suspect connections between Alerts or have relevant background information, share it before starting the investigation. This helps the agent look in the right places from the start.
  • Example: “These two Alerts might be related—the virtual disk showing high usage is hosted on the storage array that’s also alerting. Can you investigate both together?”
  • Why this helps: The agent may not automatically discover infrastructure relationships with large time gaps or missing Topology data. Your input bridges those gaps.

Request Deeper Analysis

  • If the initial root cause feels incomplete or you want to verify specific aspects, ask the agent to investigate additional layers or data sources.
  • Example: “The VM Metrics look normal, but can you also check the ESXi host Metrics? There might be host-level Resource contention affecting multiple VMs.”
  • Why this helps: The agent follows efficient investigation paths by default. Directing it to specific areas ensures thorough coverage when needed.

Guide the Investigation

  • If you have strong hypotheses based on recent changes, known issues, or operational patterns, mention them explicitly.
  • Example: “We deployed a new version of the inventory service around the same time as the Alert. Can you check if Resource usage Metrics spiked only after this change or showed similar behavior before as well?”
  • Why this helps: Your operational knowledge can point the agent toward relevant evidence it might otherwise deprioritize.

Ask for Step-by-Step Details

  • If you need to verify the investigation process or understand how conclusions were reached, request a breakdown of the analysis steps.
  • Example: “Can you walk me through the investigation steps and show me the specific evidence that led to this conclusion?”
  • Why this helps: Seeing the reasoning helps you validate findings and identify areas that need additional investigation.