DevOps Agent — Introduction
Build an Autonomous DevOps Agent
Difficulty: Advanced
Time: 45-60 minutes
Prerequisites: Complete the Personal Assistant and Research Pipeline tutorials
What We’re Building
An AI agent that operates autonomously — it doesn’t wait for users to ask questions. It:
- Monitors your infrastructure on a schedule (every 5 minutes)
- Reacts to alerts from PagerDuty/Slack via webhooks
- Investigates incidents using tools (check health, read metrics)
- Proposes fixes with risk assessments
- Waits for approval before executing risky actions
- Executes fixes and verifies they worked
- Documents everything in a durable workflow that survives crashes
This is the most complex tutorial — it uses nearly every Kernova feature.
Concepts You’ll Use
| Feature | What It Does Here |
|---|---|
defineAgent | The main DevOps agent with instructions |
defineTool | Health checks, metrics, service restart |
schedule | Run checks every 5 minutes, daily reports |
triggers | React to alert events automatically |
defineChannel | Receive PagerDuty/Slack webhooks |
defineWorkflow | Multi-step incident response with checkpoints |
requiresApproval | Human must approve before restarting services |
budget | Prevent the agent from running too many times |
permissions | What the agent is allowed to do |
Why This Matters
Most monitoring tools alert you. Most chatbots answer questions. But an autonomous DevOps agent does both — it monitors, alerts, investigates, and fixes. It turns 3am pages into “I fixed it, here’s the report” messages.
The key innovation: human-in-the-loop for safety. The agent can investigate freely, but it must ask before executing dangerous actions.
Architecture
┌─────────────────────────────────────────────────────┐│ DevOps Agent ││ instructions + tools + permissions │└──────┬───────────────┬──────────────────┬───────────┘ │ │ │ ┌────▼────┐ ┌─────▼─────┐ ┌──────▼──────┐ │Schedule │ │ Triggers │ │ Channels │ │(cron) │ │ (events) │ │ (webhooks) │ │ │ │ │ │ │ │• */5 min│ │• alert │ │• PagerDuty │ │• 9am │ │• deploy │ │• Slack │ │• Weekly │ │ failed │ │ │ └────┬────┘ └─────┬─────┘ └──────┬──────┘ │ │ │ └───────────────┼──────────────────┘ │ ┌────────▼────────┐ │ Durable Workflow │ │ (incident flow) │ ├─────────────────┤ │ 1. Detect │ │ 2. Investigate │ │ 3. Propose fix │ │ 4. ⚠️ APPROVE │ ← Human reviews here │ 5. Execute fix │ │ 6. Verify │ │ 7. Document │ └─────────────────┘