Azure SRE Agent offers intelligent and context aware automation for IT operations. Enhanced by customer feedback from our preview, the SRE Agent has evolved into an extensible platform to automate and manage tasks across Azure and other environments. Built on an Agentic DevOps approach - drawing from proven practices in internal Azure operations - the Azure SRE Agent has already saved over 20,000 engineering hours across Microsoft product teams operations, delivering strong ROI for teams seeking sustainable AIOps.

An Operations Agent that adapts to your playbooks

Azure SRE Agent is an AI powered operations automation platform that empowers SREs, DevOps, IT operations, and support teams to automate tasks such as incident response, customer support, and developer operations from a single, extensible agent. Its value proposition and capabilities have evolved beyond diagnosis and mitigation of Azure issues, to automating operational workflows and seamless integration with the standards and processes used in your organization. SRE Agent is designed to automate operational work and reduce toil, enabling developers and operators to focus on high-value tasks. By streamlining repetitive and complex processes, SRE Agent accelerates innovation and improves reliability across cloud and hybrid environments. In this article, we will look at what’s new and what has changed since the last update.

What’s New: Automation, Integration, and Extensibility

Azure SRE Agent just got a major upgrade. From no-code automation to seamless integrations and expanded data connectivity, here’s what’s new in this release:

1. No-code Sub-Agent Builder: Rapidly create custom automations without writing code.
2. Flexible, event-driven triggers: Instantly respond to incidents and operational changes.
3. Expanded data connectivity: Unify diagnostics and troubleshooting across more data sources.
4. Custom actions: Integrate with your existing tools and orchestrate end-to-end workflows via MCP.
5. Prebuilt operational scenarios: Accelerate deployment and improve reliability out of the box.

Unlike generic agent platforms, Azure SRE Agent comes with deep integrations, prebuilt tools, and frameworks specifically for IT, DevOps, and SRE workflows. This means you can automate complex operational tasks faster and more reliably, tailored to your organization’s needs.

Sub-Agent Builder: Custom Automation, No Code Required

Empower teams to automate repetitive operational tasks without coding expertise, dramatically reducing manual workload and development cycles. This feature helps address the need for targeted automation, letting teams solve specific operational pain points without relying on one-size-fits-all solutions.

1. Modular Sub-Agents: Easily create custom sub-agents tailored to your team’s needs. Each sub-agent can have its own instructions, triggers, and toolsets, letting you automate everything from outage response to customer email triage.
2. Prebuilt System Tools: Eliminate the inefficiency of creating basic automation from scratch, and choose from a rich library of hundreds of built-in tools for Azure operations, code analysis, deployment management, diagnostics, and more.
3. Custom Logic: Align automation to your unique business processes by defining your automation logic and prompts, teaching the agent to act exactly as your workflow requires.

Flexible Triggers: Automate on Your Terms

Invoke the agent to respond automatically to mission-critical events, not wait for manual commands. This feature helps speed up incident response and eliminate missed opportunities for efficiency.

1. Multi-Source Triggers: Go beyond chat-based interactions, and trigger the agent to automatically respond to Incident Management and Ticketing systems like PagerDuty and ServiceNow, Observability Alerting systems like Azure Monitor Alerts, or even on a cron-based schedule for proactive monitoring and best-practices checks. Additional trigger sources such as GitHub issues, Azure DevOps pipelines, email, etc. will be added over time. This means automation can start exactly when and where you need it.
2. Event-Driven Operations: Integrate with your CI/CD, monitoring, or support systems to launch automations in response to real-world events - like deployments, incidents, or customer requests. Vital for reducing downtime, it ensures that business-critical actions happen automatically and promptly. 

Expanded Data Connectivity: Unified Observability and Troubleshooting

Integrate data, enabling comprehensive diagnostics and troubleshooting and faster, more informed decision-making by eliminating silos and speeding up issue resolution.

1. Multiple Data Sources: The agent can now read data from Azure Monitor, Log Analytics, and Application Insights based on its Azure role-based access control (RBAC). Additional observability data sources such as Dynatrace, New Relic, Datadog, and more can be added via the Remote Model Context Protocol (MCP) servers for these tools. This gives you a unified view for diagnostics and automation.
2. Knowledge Integration: Rather than manually detailing every instruction in your prompt, you can upload your Troubleshooting Guide (TSG) or Runbook directly, allowing the agent to automatically create an execution plan from the file. You may also connect the agent to resources like SharePoint, Jira, or documentation repositories through Remote MCP servers, enabling it to retrieve needed files on its own. This approach utilizes your organization’s existing knowledge base, streamlining onboarding and enhancing consistency in managing incidents.

Azure SRE Agent is also building multi-agent collaboration by integrating with PagerDuty and Neubird, enabling advanced, cross-platform incident management and reliability across diverse environments.

Custom Actions: Automate Anything, Anywhere

Extend automation beyond Azure and integrate with any tool or workflow, solving the problem of limited automation scope and enabling end-to-end process orchestration.

1. Out-of-the-Box Actions: Instantly automate common tasks like running azcli, kubectl, creating GitHub issues, or updating Azure resources, reducing setup time and operational overhead.
2. Communication Notifications: The SRE Agent now features built-in connectors for Outlook, enabling automated email notifications, and for Microsoft Teams, allowing it to post messages directly to Teams channels for streamlined communication. 
3. Bring Your Own Actions: Drop in your own Remote MCP servers to extend the agent’s capabilities to any custom tool or workflow. Future-proof your agentic DevOps by automating proprietary or emerging processes with confidence.

Prebuilt Operations Scenarios

Address common operational challenges out of the box, saving teams time and effort while improving reliability and customer satisfaction.

1. Incident Response: Minimize business impact and reduce operational risk by automating detection, diagnosis, and mitigation of your workload stack. The agent has built-in runbooks for common issues related to many Azure resource types including Azure Kubernetes Service (AKS), Azure Container Apps (ACA), Azure App Service, Azure Logic Apps, Azure Database for PostgreSQL, Azure CosmosDB, Azure VMs, etc. Support for additional resource types is being added continually, please see product documentation for the latest information.
2. Root Cause Analysis & IaC Drift Detection: Instantly pinpoint incident causes with AI-driven root cause analysis including automated source code scanning via GitHub and Azure DevOps integration. Proactively detect and resolve infrastructure drift by comparing live cloud environments against source-controlled IaC, ensuring configuration consistency and compliance.
3. Handle Complex Investigations: Enable the deep investigation mode that uses a hypothesis-driven method to analyze possible root causes. It collects logs and metrics, tests hypotheses with iterative checks, and documents findings. The process delivers a clear summary and actionable steps to help teams accurately resolve critical issues.
4. Incident Analysis: The integrated dashboard offers a comprehensive overview of all incidents managed by the SRE Agent. It presents essential metrics, including the number of incidents reviewed, assisted, and mitigated by the agent, as well as those awaiting human intervention. Users can leverage aggregated visualizations and AI-generated root cause analyses to gain insights into incident processing, identify trends, enhance response strategies, and detect areas for improvement in incident management.
5. Inbuilt Agent Memory: The new SRE Agent Memory System transforms incident response by institutionalizing the expertise of top SREs - capturing, indexing, and reusing critical knowledge from past incidents, investigations, and user guidance. Benefit from faster, more accurate troubleshooting, as the agent learns from both successes and mistakes, surfacing relevant insights, runbooks, and mitigation strategies exactly when needed. This system leverages advanced retrieval techniques and a domain-aware schema to ensure every on-call engagement is smarter than the last, reducing mean time to resolution (MTTR) and minimizing repeated toil. Automatically gain a continuously improving agent that remembers what works, avoids past pitfalls, and delivers actionable guidance tailored to the environment.
6. GitHub Copilot and Azure DevOps Integration: Automatically triage, respond to, and resolve issues raised in GitHub or Azure DevOps. Integration with modern development platforms such as GitHub Copilot coding agent increases efficiency and ensures that issues are resolved faster, reducing bottlenecks in the development lifecycle.

Ready to get started?

• Azure SRE Agent home page
• Product overview
• Pricing Page
• Pricing Calculator
• Pricing Blog
• Demo recordings
• Deployment samples

What’s Next?

Give us feedback: Your feedback is critical - You can Thumbs Up / Thumbs Down each interaction or thread, or go to the “Give Feedback” button in the agent to give us in-product feedback - or you can create issues or just share your thoughts in our GitHub repo at https://github.com/microsoft/sre-agent.

We’re just getting started. In the coming months, expect even more prebuilt integrations, expanded data sources, and new automation scenarios. We anticipate continuous growth and improvement throughout our agentic AI platforms and services to effectively address customer needs and preferences.  Let us know what Ops toil you want to automate next!