What is a Digest Agent?
Also known as Proactive Discovery, TierZero Digest Agent actively scans for reliability risks, performance degradation, and creeping observability costs that no alert would catch. It generates comprehensive operational reports and delivers them on your schedule.Key Capabilities
Continuous Monitoring
Surfaces slow degradation patterns that slip past threshold-based alerts and go unnoticed until something breaks.- Slow degradation detection: Catch latency creep and memory leaks before they trigger alerts.
- Cross-service correlation: Individual metrics look fine. Together, they tell a different story.
- Historical trend analysis: Compare against baselines from weeks ago, not just hours.
- SLO burn rate monitoring: Catch error budget depletion before it breaches your SLO thresholds.
Anomaly Detection
Detects unusual spend spikes, latency creep, and rising error rates before they compound into outages. Each anomaly comes with context and a suggested next step.- Cost anomalies: Catch unexpected spend increases before they hit your cloud bill.
- Performance regression: Surface latency trends and throughput drops, along with the commit that caused them.
- Error rate analysis: Track error patterns and correlate with deployments and infrastructure changes.
Pre-Deploy Risk Detection
Correlates recent deploys with performance regression. Identifies which commit introduced latency, error rate spikes, or resource anomalies before they become incidents.- Deploy-correlated regression detection: Automatically links performance degradation to specific deployments and commits.
- Pre-merge risk scoring: Surface high-risk changes based on historical deployment failure patterns.
Cost Intelligence
Proactive Discovery scans for cost anomalies, billing spikes, and over-provisioned resources across your cloud infrastructure.- Billing anomaly alerts: Detect unexpected cost spikes across cloud providers before they hit your monthly bill.
- Resource utilization analysis: Identify over-provisioned and under-utilized resources across your infrastructure.
- Auto-scaling policy drift: Detect when scaling policies diverge from actual usage patterns.
- Capacity trend monitoring: Surface capacity trends before they become incidents.
Scheduled Delivery
Runs on your schedule via cron and posts results directly to Slack, keeping the whole team informed without manual effort.Use Cases
Detect Emerging Risks Earlier
- Challenge: Slow drift and multi-week trends (e.g., rising 95th percentile latency) are easy to miss.
- How it works: Digest Agents compare recent periods against baselines and flag material degradation.
- Outcome: Early warnings with clear evidence so teams can act before issues escalate.
Operational Hygiene
- Challenge: Recurring issues and noisy alerts persist because insights are fragmented and hygiene work is deprioritized.
- How it works: Digest Agent sections track repeating patterns (flaky tests, noisy alerts, SLO misses), highlight cleanup actions, and link to investigations or tickets. Posting to Slack keeps hygiene tasks visible.
- Outcome: Continuous improvement loop that reduces toil and alert noise while improving reliability over time.
Cost Management
- Challenge: Infrastructure costs grow silently until someone notices a surprising bill.
- How it works: Digest Agents track spend across cloud providers, identify cost spikes, and surface optimization opportunities (idle resources, oversized instances, unused storage).
- Outcome: Proactive cost control with clear visibility into where money is going.
Stakeholder Alignment
- Challenge: Leaders and partner teams need consistent, comparable updates; ad-hoc reporting creates misalignment and delays decisions.
- How it works: Scheduled Digest Agents present week-over-week trends (e.g., error rates, latency, cost), summarize incidents and mitigations, and outline next-week priorities. Deliver to stakeholder Slack channels for broad visibility.
- Outcome: Shared source of truth that speeds decision-making and reduces status meetings.
How to Create a Digest Agent
Step 1: Define Task
Specify instructions for your digest agent to generate a report or perform a task.- Go to Digest Agents and click “Create Digest Agent”
- Add one or more content sections with:
- Section Name: A label for this part of the report (e.g., “Weekly Metrics Summary”)
- Instructions: What TierZero should analyze and report on
- Note: Sections are independent and do not share context with each other
Step 2: Schedule
Set when and where to send your digest report.- Cron Expression: Define the schedule (e.g.,
0 9 * * 1for 9am every Monday) - Slack Channels: Select channels to post results to
- Discord Webhooks: Optionally send to Discord
- Notification Format: Choose between summary or full report
Step 3: Review
Review your configuration and create the digest agent.- Set a name for your digest agent
- Review all sections and schedule settings
- Click “Create Agent”
Running Digest Agents
Manual Runs
- From the digest agent page, click “Run Now” to generate a report immediately
- Choose whether to send Slack notifications for that run
Scheduled Runs
- Runs automatically based on your cron schedule
- Posts to configured Slack channels
Reviewing Results
- See your digest agent runs listed with timestamps and status
- Open a run to review the compiled report
Best Practices
1. Group Context-Dependent Instructions- Sections are independent and do not share context
- If multiple instructions rely on the same telemetry data or intermediate results, keep them together in a single section for higher efficiency
- Define the desired report format and the exact “how” (e.g., data sources to use, metrics to compare, thresholds/SLAs)
- Specific instructions produce consistent, comparable, and high quality reports across runs
- Use Prompt Studio to test section prompts against recent data
- Compare versions side-by-side, tighten wording for clarity
- Save improvements back to the digest agent