Nissist: An Incident Mitigation Copilot based on Troubleshooting Guides

Kaikai An, Fangkai Yang, Junting Lu, Liqun Li, Zhixing Ren, Hao Huang, Lu Wang, Pu Zhao, Yu Kang, Hua Ding, Qingwei Lin, Saravan Rajmohan, Dongmei Zhang, Qi Zhang

Abstract: Effective incident management is pivotal for the smooth operation of Microsoft cloud services. In order to expedite incident mitigation, service teams gather troubleshooting knowledge into Troubleshooting Guides (TSGs) accessible to On-Call Engineers (OCEs). While automated pipelines are enabled to resolve the most frequent and easy incidents, there still exist complex incidents that require OCEs’ intervention. In addition, TSGs are often unstructured and incomplete, which requires manual interpretation by OCEs, leading to on-call fatigue and decreased productivity, especially among new-hire OCEs. In this work, we propose Nissist which leverages unstructured TSGs and incident mitigation history to provide proactive incident mitigation suggestions, reducing human intervention. Leveraging Large Language Models (LLM), Nissist extracts knowledge from unstructured TSGs and incident mitigation history, forming a comprehensive knowledge base. Its multi-agent system design enhances proficiency in precisely discerning OCE intents, retrieving relevant information, and delivering systematic plans consecutively. Through our user experiments, we demonstrate that Nissist significantly reduce Time to Mitigate (TTM) in incident mitigation, alleviating operational burdens on OCEs and improving service reliability. Our webpage is available at unmapped: uri https://aka.ms/nissist.