Self Service AI agents

Next-generation platform The Self Service AI agents are part of a powerful suite of IBM® watsonx™-powered AI agents. The AI agents deliver proactive support with real-time insights to administrators. Using advanced natural language processing, these agents interpret prompts and queries to run tasks, making it easier to manage IBM Sterling® Order Management System SaaS environments.

Note: Access and explore the Self Service AI agents in a free private preview program. As a program participant you get early access to unreleased IBM features, share your insights, and partner with us to shape the future of AI agent-powered support. To participate in the private preview program, see IBM Sterling Order Management AI Agent private preview.

Note: The private preview is designed for IBM Sterling Order Management System SaaS customers today, with plans to extend support to on-premises environments in the future.

The following six System Administration Utility agents are part of this suite.

Server Management Agent: The Server Management Agent streamlines server administration tasks by providing intuitive tools to create, update, start, stop, and restart the server.
Schedule Management Agent: The Schedule Management Agent handles all scheduling-related tasks, allowing users to view, create, update, and delete schedules efficiently. It provides smart scheduling recommendations that are based on existing schedules and upcoming events to avoid conflicts and optimize resource utilization. The agent analyzes historical scheduling patterns to suggest optimal timing for new tasks.
Event Calendar Agent: The Event Calendar Agent manages environment upgrades and maintenance events across the system. It provides a centralized view of all planned activities, helping teams coordinate their work and avoid scheduling conflicts.
Queue Management Agent: The Queue Management Agent provides comprehensive queue administration capabilities, including creating, updating, viewing, and configuring queues.
Diagnostics Agent: The Diagnostics Agent provides quick access to export applications, agents, integration, and IBM MQ logs.
Process Management Agent: The Process Management Agent monitors system processes to help ensure smooth operations. It provides real-time visibility into process status, identifies problematic processes, and provides a comprehensive summary on failures.

The following two Performance Monitoring agents are part of this suite.

Resource Optimizer Agent: The Resource Optimizer Agent intelligently scales workloads up and down based on performance KPIs to help ensure efficient resource allocation and reduce costs. It analyzes resource utilization patterns, identifies optimization opportunities, and implements right-sizing recommendations. The agent balances performance requirements with cost considerations to achieve optimal resource efficiency across the environment.
Observability Agent: The Observability Agent provides comprehensive monitoring and analytics across multiple system dimensions. It tracks application performance KPIs such as throughput, error rates, and latency, and platform metrics such as memory, CPU, and heap usage. It also tracks queue statistics, database health, IBM Sterling™ Intelligent Promising performance, and business-critical metrics. The agent delivers in-depth performance analysis, pinpoints bottlenecks, and offers actionable insights to facilitate optimization and proactive issue resolution before any impact to business operations.

Key capabilities

The Self Service AI agents offer the following key capabilities.

Intelligent understanding: The AI agents use large language models to comprehend and respond to natural language inputs and text commands.
Contextual awareness: The AI agents understand the conversation context, retrieve relevant information from various systems, databases, and APIs, and provide responses and recommendations.

Key benefits

The Self Service AI agents deliver the following key benefits to OMS operations.

Operational efficiency

Automates routine tasks and provides guided workflows to reduce task completion time and effort.

Enhanced user experience

Provides an intuitive conversational interface, reducing the learning curve for new users.

Key areas of assistance

The Self Service AI agents are designed to simplify system interaction and provide proactive support for System Administrators. With its ability to understand natural language prompts, questions, and requests, the Self Service AI agent can assist with a wide range of tasks, from system administration to monitoring and analytics.

The Self Service AI agents can help with the following key areas.

System administration

The Self Service AI agents streamline system administration by providing intuitive tools for server management, smart scheduling, and resource optimization. Specifically, they can assist with the following system administration tasks.

Server management: Create, update, start, stop, restart, and schedule servers.
Schedule management: View, create, update, and delete schedules, with smart scheduling recommendations based on existing schedules and upcoming events.
Event calendar management: Manage environment upgrades and maintenance events.
Queue management: Create, update, view, and configure queues, including browsing pending tasks, prioritizing tasks, and optimizing queue performance.
Resource optimization: Scale workloads up and down based on performance KPIs to help ensure efficient resource allocation and reduce costs.
Process management: Manage and view process status to help ensure smooth operation.

Monitoring and analytics

The Self Service AI agents provide in-depth performance analysis, pinpointing bottlenecks and offering actionable insights to facilitate optimization and proactive issue resolution. Specifically, the Self Service AI agents can help with the following monitoring and analytics tasks.

Application performance monitoring: Track key performance indicators (KPIs) such as throughput, error rates, latency, and external service performance.
Platform performance monitoring: Monitor system resources, including memory, CPU usage, heap, garbage collection, and thread utilization.
Queue performance monitoring: Analyze queue statistics, including connection counts and queue depths.
Database performance monitoring: Provide insights into database health, including disk size, top tables, maintenance, long-running queries, and lock-wait status.
SIP performance monitoring: Monitor SIP performance metrics, such as events published, response times, and API call throughput.
Business performance monitoring: Track business-critical metrics, including order lines that are created , scheduled, released, and failed, inventory activity, and other KPIs.

Sample requests and prompts

For some examples of the types of questions and requests that you can make when you are working with the Self Service AI agents, see the following sample prompts.

Show me the agent servers that are least used by the CPU.
Provide a recommendation on server resource utilization
Perform a health check
When is the best time to schedule a new server
Do I have any database lock waits?
When was my most recent calendar event?
What was my last failed process?
How to improve JMS PUT performance
When was the last time we uploaded a customization extension?
Recommend when we should set up server schedules (when we don't have peak loads).