Concert assistant

Where to find Concert assistant

Concert assistant appears as a chat interface in the sidebar on Concert home. This sidebar is open by default but you can close and reopen it by clicking the AI icon in the platform header menu.

What Concert assistant can do

Concert assistant operates across five core capacities that work together to help you understand and act on operational issues:

Answer questions about your environment

Ask about incidents, resource utilization, vulnerabilities, or any operational data across your hybrid environment. The assistant retrieves information from the unified data layer and presents it in natural language and data visualizations.

Correlate signals across domains

Depending on your entitlements, the assistant connects observability data from Concert Observe, optimization recommendations from Concert Optimize, and security findings from Concert Protect. It identifies relationships between signals that might not be obvious when you view each capability in isolation.

Explain findings and recommendations

The assistant describes what it found, why it matters, and what the data means for your operations. When it generates recommendations, it explains the reasoning behind them and the expected impact of following them.

Guide you through decisions

For complex scenarios, the assistant breaks down the problem, presents options, and helps you evaluate tradeoffs. It can suggest next steps based on the current state of your environment and the severity of the issue.

Act on your behalf with approval

For tasks that span multiple capabilities or require coordination across tools, the assistant can run actions after you review and approve the plan. These tasks include investigating incidents across observability data, analyzing code for potential fixes, or coordinating optimization actions.

How Concert assistant works

When you submit a query, the Concert assistant analyzes your request and routes it to the appropriate coordinator based on the task. The platform includes several coordinators, each managing specialized agents for specific domains:

Observability coordinator

Handles incident investigation, root cause analysis, and application performance monitoring through Instana-powered agents. The assistant calls this agent when you ask about traces, metrics, logs, and application health.

Optimize coordinator

Manages infrastructure optimization, resource allocation, and cost management through Turbonomic-powered agents. The assistant calls this agent when you ask about pending actions, resource efficiency, and capacity planning.

Concert coordinator

Handles resilience assessment, vulnerability management, and compliance validation. The assistant calls this agent when you ask about CVEs, certificates, resilience scores, and security posture.

UI dashboard agent

Collects data and metrics from the data access layer to build custom views. The assistant calls this agent when you request custom dashboards or visualizations that are tailored to your operational needs.

The assistant maintains conversation context across multiple turns, so you can ask follow-up questions without repeating information. It references previous queries and results to provide more relevant responses as the conversation progresses.

Human-in-the-loop controls

For complex or sensitive operations, Concert assistant generates an execution plan and presents it for your review before proceeding. This human-in-the-loop (HITL) approach keeps you in control of actions that affect your environment.

When the assistant proposes a multi-step workflow, you see the following details:

• Task breakdown: Each step the assistant will run, in order
• Agent assignments: Which coordinator or agent handles each step
• Dependencies: Which steps must complete before others can start
• Parallel execution: Which steps can run simultaneously

You can review the plan, approve it to proceed, or reject it if the approach does not fit your needs. The assistant runs approved plans and reports progress as each step completes.

Example: Incident investigation workflow

When you ask Concert assistant to investigate a production incident, it coordinates across multiple capabilities to identify the root cause and suggest remediation:

1. The assistant analyzes your request and identifies which coordinators need to participate
2. It queries the observability coordinator for traces, metrics, and logs related to the incident
3. It checks the optimize coordinator for pending resource actions that might address the issue
4. It assesses the Concert coordinator for resilience scores and vulnerability context
5. It synthesizes findings from all coordinators into a coherent analysis
6. If code changes are needed, it can analyze the application code and suggest fixes
7. It presents a plan that shows all steps and asks for your approval
8. After you approve, it runs the plan and reports results for each step

This workflow demonstrates how the assistant correlates signals, explains its reasoning, and uses HITL controls for complex operations.