Skills & Runbooks

Skills and runbooks add domain expertise to Oodle's AI assistant. They capture your team's debugging workflows, investigation playbooks, and operational procedures so the AI can follow them automatically.

When you ask a question in AI Canvas or through MCP, Oodle detects relevant skills and applies them to guide its investigation. You can also attach skills directly to monitors so the AI follows a specific runbook when that alert fires.

Concepts

Skills

Skills are structured investigation workflows. Each skill has a name, a description that tells the AI when to use it, and a set of steps written in natural language - similar to an AGENTS.md file. The AI follows these steps when the skill is triggered.

Runbooks

Runbooks are attached to specific monitors and guide the AI when that alert fires. Unlike skills, runbooks are created automatically - Oodle learns from how your team investigates incidents and generates a runbook to handle future instances of the same alert. You can review, edit, or disable auto-generated runbooks at any time.

Creating a Skill

1. Navigate to AI Center > Skills in the sidebar.
2. Click + New Skill in the top-right corner.
3. Fill in the following fields:

Field	Description
Name	A short identifier for the skill (up to 100 characters).
Description	Tells the AI when to use this skill. Be specific - for example, "Use when the user asks whether an issue affects one customer or multiple customers and wants cross-cluster comparison."
Steps	The investigation procedure the AI should follow. Supports Markdown. Use the Write, Preview, and Upload file tabs to author the content.

4. Click Save.

Writing Effective Steps

Write steps the way you would brief a new on-call engineer. Include:

• What to check first and in what order.
• Which metrics, logs, or traces to query.
• How to interpret the results.
• What output format to produce (verdict, comparison table, confidence level).

Example - API query service fan-out investigation:

Name: api-query-fanout-investigation

Description: When investigating api-server query errors, look for massive fan-out across shards and HTTP 400 error responses returning unexpected content.

When api-server query errors spike, investigate the
query-worker container logs.

1. Look for 'StatusCode: 0, canceled, context canceled'
   warnings - this indicates a massive fan-out across
   shards (e.g., data-partition-{0-9}) where queries are
   being canceled due to timeouts.

2. Check for 'StatusCode: 400' errors returning HTML/XML
   instead of expected JSON. This means an upstream
   dependency is returning an error page, causing
   deserialization failures in the query path.

3. Verify if the failing queries are missing required
   parameters like 'start' or 'end' timestamps. Missing
   parameters cause the upstream to reject the request
   with a 400.

4. If fan-out is confirmed, check whether the query scope
   is too broad (too many shards) and whether adding
   tighter label filters would reduce the blast radius.

Attaching Skills to Monitors

You can attach a skill or runbook to a monitor so the AI references it when investigating that alert:

1. Open the monitor you want to configure.
2. In the monitor settings, select a skill under the Runbook field.
3. Save the monitor.

When this monitor fires and you ask the AI about it, the attached runbook is loaded automatically.

Skill Sources

Skills can come from two sources, visible in the Source filter on the Skills & Runbooks page:

Source	Description
User	Created manually by your team.
Auto-learned	Generated by Oodle based on observed patterns and past investigations. You can review, edit, or disable these.

Enabling and Disabling Skills

Each skill has an Enabled toggle. Disabled skills are not loaded by the AI during conversations. Use this to temporarily remove a skill without deleting it.

Using Skills

In AI Canvas

Skills are loaded on demand. When you ask a question in AI Canvas, the AI matches your query against skill descriptions and applies relevant skills automatically. You can also reference a skill by name in your prompt.

Via MCP

Skills are exposed through the Oodle MCP server. Any AI agent connected to Oodle's MCP - such as Claude Code or Cursor - can discover and invoke skills during a conversation.

With Alerts

When you ask the AI about a firing alert that has an attached runbook, the AI follows the runbook steps to investigate and report findings.

Managing Skills

From the Skills & Runbooks page you can:

• Search skills using the search bar.
• Filter by type (Skill / Runbook), source (Auto-learned / User), or status (Enabled).
• Edit a skill by clicking on it to open the edit dialog.
• Clone an existing skill to create a variation.
• Delete a skill from the edit dialog.