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AI Assistant

The AI Assistant uses generative AI to provide:

  • Chat: Have conversations with the AI Assistant. Chat uses function calling to request, analyze, and visualize your data.
  • Contextual insights: Open prompts throughout Observability that explain errors and messages and suggest remediation.

The AI Assistant integrates with your large language model (LLM) provider through our supported Elastic connectors:

Important

The AI Assistant is powered by an integration with your large language model (LLM) provider. LLMs are known to sometimes present incorrect information as if it's correct. Elastic supports configuration and connection to the LLM provider and your knowledge base, but is not responsible for the LLM's responses.

Important

Also, the data you provide to the Observability AI assistant is not anonymized, and is stored and processed by the third-party AI provider. This includes any data used in conversations for analysis or context, such as alert or event data, detection rule configurations, and queries. Therefore, be careful about sharing any confidential or sensitive details while using this feature.

Requirements

The AI assistant requires the following:

  • An account with a third-party generative AI provider that supports function calling. The Observability AI Assistant supports the following providers:
    • OpenAI gpt-4+.
    • Azure OpenAI Service gpt-4(0613) or gpt-4-32k(0613) with API version 2023-07-01-preview or more recent.
    • AWS Bedrock, specifically the Anthropic Claude models.
  • The knowledge base requires a 4 GB machine learning node.

Your data and the AI Assistant

Elastic does not use customer data for model training. This includes anything you send the model, such as alert or event data, detection rule configurations, queries, and prompts. However, any data you provide to the AI Assistant will be processed by the third-party provider you chose when setting up the OpenAI connector as part of the assistant setup.

Elastic does not control third-party tools, and assumes no responsibility or liability for their content, operation, or use, nor for any loss or damage that may arise from your using such tools. Please exercise caution when using AI tools with personal, sensitive, or confidential information. Any data you submit may be used by the provider for AI training or other purposes. There is no guarantee that the provider will keep any information you provide secure or confidential. You should familiarize yourself with the privacy practices and terms of use of any generative AI tools prior to use.

Set up the AI Assistant

To set up the AI Assistant:

  1. Create an authentication key with your AI provider to authenticate requests from the AI Assistant. You'll use this in the next step. Refer to your provider's documentation for information about creating authentication keys:
  2. From Project settings → Management → Connectors, create an OpenAI or Amazon Bedrock connector.
  3. Authenticate communication between Observability and the AI provider by providing the following information:
    1. In the URL field, enter the AI provider's API endpoint URL.
    2. Under Authentication, enter the API key or access key/secret you created in the previous step.

Add data to the AI Assistant knowledge base

Important

If you started using the AI Assistant in technical preview, any knowledge base articles you created using ELSER v1 will need to be reindexed or upgraded before they can be used. Going forward, you must create knowledge base articles using ELSER v2. You can either:

  • Clear all old knowledge base articles manually and reindex them.
  • Upgrade all knowledge base articles indexed with ELSER v1 to ELSER v2 using a Python script.

The AI Assistant uses ELSER, Elastic's semantic search engine, to recall data from its internal knowledge base index to create retrieval augmented generation (RAG) responses. Adding data such as Runbooks, GitHub issues, internal documentation, and Slack messages to the knowledge base gives the AI Assistant context to provide more specific assistance.

Note

Your AI provider may collect telemetry when using the AI Assistant. Contact your AI provider for information on how data is collected.

You can add information to the knowledge base by asking the AI Assistant to remember something while chatting (for example, "remember this for next time"). The assistant will create a summary of the information and add it to the knowledge base.

You can also add external data to the knowledge base either in the Project Settings UI or using the Elasticsearch Index API.

Use the UI

To add external data to the knowledge base in the Project Settings UI:

  1. Go to Project Settings.

  2. In the Other section, click AI assistant for Observability settings.

  3. Then select the Elastic AI Assistant for Observability.

  4. Switch to the Knowledge base tab.

  5. Click the New entry button, and choose either:

    • Single entry: Write content for a single entry in the UI.

    • Bulk import: Upload a newline delimited JSON (ndjson) file containing a list of entries to add to the knowledge base. Each object should conform to the following format:

      {
        "id": "a_unique_human_readable_id",
        "text": "Contents of item",
      }

Use the Elasticsearch Index API

  1. Ingest external data (GitHub issues, Markdown files, Jira tickets, text files, etc.) into Elasticsearch using the Elasticsearch Index API.
  2. Reindex your data into the AI Assistant's knowledge base index by completing the following query in Developer Tools → Console. Update the following fields before reindexing:
    • InternalDocsIndex: Name of the index where your internal documents are stored.
    • text_field: Name of the field containing your internal documents' text.
    • timestamp: Name of the timestamp field in your internal documents.
    • public: If true, the document is available to all users with access to your Observability project. If false, the document is restricted to the user indicated in the following user.name field.
    • user.name (optional): If defined, restricts the internal document's availability to a specific user.
    • You can add a query filter to index specific documents.
POST _reindex
{
    "source": {
        "index": "<InternalDocsIndex>",
        "_source": [
            "<text_field>",
            "<timestamp>",
            "namespace",
            "is_correction",
            "public",
            "confidence"
        ]
    },
    "dest": {
        "index": ".kibana-observability-ai-assistant-kb-000001",
        "pipeline": ".kibana-observability-ai-assistant-kb-ingest-pipeline"
    },
    "script": {
        "inline": "ctx._source.text = ctx._source.remove(\"<text_field>\");ctx._source.namespace=\"<space>\";ctx._source.is_correction=false;ctx._source.public=<public>;ctx._source.confidence=\"high\";ctx._source['@timestamp'] = ctx._source.remove(\"<timestamp>\");ctx._source['user.name'] = \"<user.name>\""
    }
}

Interact with the AI Assistant

You can chat with the AI Assistant or interact with contextual insights located throughout Observability. See the following sections for more on interacting with the AI Assistant.

Tip

After every answer the LLM provides, let us know if the answer was helpful. Your feedback helps us improve the AI Assistant!

AI Assistant chat

Click AI Assistant in the upper-right corner where available to start the chat:

This opens the AI Assistant flyout, where you can ask the assistant questions about your instance:

AI Assistant functions

Beta feature

This functionality is in beta and is subject to change. The design and code is less mature than official generally available features and is being provided as-is with no warranties. Beta features are not subject to the support service level agreement of official generally available features.

The AI Assistant uses several functions to include relevant context in the chat conversation through text, data, and visual components. Both you and the AI Assistant can suggest functions. You can also edit the AI Assistant's function suggestions and inspect function responses. For example, you could use the kibana function to call a Kibana API on your behalf.

You can suggest the following functions:

FunctionDescription
alerts
Get alerts for Observability.
elasticsearch
Call Elasticsearch APIs on your behalf.
kibana
Call Kibana APIs on your behalf.
summarize
Summarize parts of the conversation.
visualize_query
Visualize charts for ES|QL queries.

Additional functions are available when your cluster has APM data:

FunctionDescription
get_apm_correlations
Get field values that are more prominent in the foreground set than the background set. This can be useful in determining which attributes (such as error.message, service.node.name, or transaction.name) are contributing to, for instance, a higher latency. Another option is a time-based comparison, where you compare before and after a change point.
get_apm_downstream_dependencies
Get the downstream dependencies (services or uninstrumented backends) for a service. Map the downstream dependency name to a service by returning both span.destination.service.resource and service.name. Use this to drill down further if needed.
get_apm_error_document
Get a sample error document based on the grouping name. This also includes the stacktrace of the error, which might hint to the cause.
get_apm_service_summary
Get a summary of a single service, including the language, service version, deployments, the environments, and the infrastructure that it is running in. For example, the number of pods and a list of their downstream dependencies. It also returns active alerts and anomalies.
get_apm_services_list
Get the list of monitored services, their health statuses, and alerts.
get_apm_timeseries
Display different APM metrics (such as throughput, failure rate, or latency) for any service or all services and any or all of their dependencies. Displayed both as a time series and as a single statistic. Additionally, the function returns any changes, such as spikes, step and trend changes, or dips. You can also use it to compare data by requesting two different time ranges, or, for example, two different service versions.

AI Assistant contextual prompts

AI Assistant contextual prompts throughout Observability provide the following information:

  • Alerts: Provides possible causes and remediation suggestions for log rate changes.
  • Application performance monitoring (APM): Explains APM errors and provides remediation suggestions.
  • Logs: Explains log messages and generates search patterns to find similar issues.

For example, in the log details, you'll see prompts for What's this message? and How do I find similar log messages?:

Clicking a prompt generates a message specific to that log entry. You can continue a conversation from a contextual prompt by clicking Start chat to open the AI Assistant chat.

Known issues

Token limits

Most LLMs have a set number of tokens they can manage in single a conversation. When you reach the token limit, the LLM will throw an error, and Elastic will display a "Token limit reached" error. The exact number of tokens that the LLM can support depends on the LLM provider and model you're using.

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