Your inbox is full. GitHub issues piling up. "App not working." "How do I configure alerts?" "Please add dark mode." You open each one, figure out what it is, ask for more info, add labels, route to the right team. An hour later, you're still sorting issues. Sound familiar?
The Triage Tax
Every L1 support engineer, PM, and on-call developer who's handled customer issues knows this pain. When tickets come in, you're not solving problems, you're sorting them.
Read the issue. Is it a bug or a question? Check the docs. Does this feature exist? Ask for more info. Wait two days. Re-triage. Add labels. Route to engineering.
It's tedious. It requires judgment, you need to understand the product, know what info is needed, check documentation. And honestly? It's work that nobody volunteers for but someone has to do.
In large organizations, it gets even more complex. The issue doesn't just need to be triaged, it needs to be routed to the right engineering team. Is this an auth issue? Frontend? Backend? Infrastructure? A wrong routing decision means delays, re-assignments, and frustrated customers.
What if an AI agent could do this for you?
Enter Azure SRE Agent + MCP
Here's what I built: I gave SRE Agent access to my GitHub and PagerDuty accounts via MCP, uploaded my triage rubric as a markdown file, and set it to run twice a day.
No more reading every ticket manually. No more asking the same "please provide more info" questions. No more morning triage sessions.
What My Setup Looks Like
My app's customer issues come in through GitHub. My team uses PagerDuty to track bugs and incidents. So I connected both via MCP to the SRE Agent.
I also uploaded my triage logic as a .md file on how to classify issues, what info is required for each category, which labels to use, which team handles what.
And since I didn't want to run this workflow manually, I set up a scheduled task to trigger it twice a day. Now it just runs. I verify its work if I want to.
What the Agent Does
- Fetches all open, unlabeled GitHub issues
- Reads each issue and classifies it (bug, doc question, feature request)
- Checks if required info is present
- Posts a comment asking for details if needed, or acknowledges the issue
- Adds appropriate labels
- Creates a PagerDuty incident for bugs ready for engineering
- Moves to the next issue
How I Built It: Step by Step
Let me walk you through exactly how I set this up inside SRE Agent.
Step 1: Create an SRE Agent
I created a new SRE Agent in the Azure portal. Since this workflow triages GitHub issues and not Azure resources, I didn't need to configure any Azure resource groups or subscriptions. Just an agent.
Step 2: Connect MCP Servers
I added two MCP servers to give the agent access to my tools:
- GitHub MCP– Fetch issues, post comments, add labels
- PagerDuty MCP – Create incidents for bugs that need dev team's attention
MCP (Model Context Protocol) lets you bring any API into the agent. If your tool has an API, you can connect it.
Step 3: Create Subagents
I created two focused subagents, each with a specific job and only the tools it needs:
GitHub Issue Triager
"You are expert in triaging GitHub issues, classifying them into categories such as user needs to supply additional information, bug, documentation question, or feature request. Use the knowledge base to search for the right document that helps you with performing this triaging. Perform all actions autonomously without waiting for user input. Hand off to Incident Creator for the issues you classified as bugs."
Tools: GitHub MCP (issues, labels, comments)
Incident Creator
Here "You are expert in managing incidents in PagerDuty, listing services, incidents, creating incidents with all details. Once done, hand off back to GitHub Issue Triager."
Tools: PagerDuty MCP (services, incidents)
The handoff between them creates a workflow. They collaborate without human involvement.
Step 4: Add Your Knowledge
I uploaded my triage logic as a .md file to the agent's knowledge base. This is my rubric - my mental model for how to triage issues:
- How do I classify bugs vs. doc questions vs. feature requests?
- What info is required for each category?
- What labels do I use?
- When should an incident be created?
- Which team handles which type of issue?
I wrote it down the way I'd explain it to a new teammate. The agent searches and follows it.
Step 5: Add a Scheduled Task
I didn't want to trigger this workflow manually every time. SRE Agent supports scheduled tasks, workflows that run automatically on a cadence.
I set up a trigger to run twice a day: morning and evening. Now the workflow is fully automated. Here is the end to end automated agentic workflow to triage customer tickets.
Why MCP Matters
Every team uses different tools. Maybe your customer issues live in Zendesk, incidents go to ServiceNow and you use Jira or Azure DevOps.
SRE Agent doesn't lock you in. With MCP, you connect to whatever tools you already use. The agent orchestrates across them.
That's the extensibility model: your tools, your workflow, orchestrated by the agent.
The Result
Before: 2 hours every morning sorting tickets.
After: By the time anyone logs in, issues are labeled, missing-info requests are posted, urgent bugs have incidents, and feature requests are acknowledged.
Your team can finally focus on the complex stuff not sorting tickets.
Why This Matters
Faster response times. Issues get acknowledged in minutes, not days.
Consistent classification. No "this should have been a P1" moments. No tickets bouncing between teams.
Happier customers. They get a response immediately even if it's just "we're looking into it."
Focus on what matters. Your team should be solving problems, not sorting them.
The Bottom Line
Triage isn't the job, it's the tax on the job. It quietly eats the hours your team could spend building, debugging, and shipping.
You don't need to build a custom triage bot. You don't need to wire up webhooks and write glue code. You give the SRE agent your tools, your logic, and a schedule and it handles the sorting.
Use GitHub? Connect GitHub. Use Zendesk? Connect Zendesk. PagerDuty, ServiceNow, Jira - whatever your team runs on, the agent meets you there.
Stop sorting tickets. Start shipping.
A Few Tips
- Test MCP endpoints before configuring them in the SRE agent
- Give each subagent only the tools it needs, don't enable everything
- Start read-only until you trust the classification, then enable comments
Do You Still Want to Triage Issues Manually?
What tools does your team use to track customer-reported issues and incidents? Let us know in the comments, we'd love to hear how you'd use this workflow with your stack.
Is triage your most toilsome workflow or is there something even worse eating your team's time? Let us know in the comments.
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