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Neeraja Khanapure
Neeraja Khanapure

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Something I wish someone had told me five years earlier:

LinkedIn Draft — Insight (2026-05-15)

Something I wish someone had told me five years earlier:

AIOps is a reasoning accelerator, not an auto-remediation system

The orgs getting real value from AIOps aren't the ones automating remediation — they're the ones using AI to compress the signal-to-hypothesis gap. The hard part of incidents isn't fixing things. It's knowing what to fix, in what order, with what confidence.

Where AI adds real value in incidents:

Alert storm (200 events)
       │
       ▼
  [AI correlation]  ──▶  3 likely root causes (ranked)
       │
       ▼
  [AI runbook retrieval]  ──▶  Relevant steps surfaced
       │
       ▼
  Human validates hypothesis  ──▶  Takes action
       │
  Auto-remediation only here ──▶  After human confirms
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The non-obvious part:
→ AI that remediates without evidence is hallucination-as-a-service. The models that earn trust are the ones that show their work: here's the metric spike, here's the correlated trace, here's the similar past incident. Evidence first, action second.

My rule:
→ Use AI for hypothesis ranking and runbook retrieval. Keep remediation behind explicit human approval. Trust is earned incrementally — don't give it away in the initial design.

Worth reading:
▸ OpenTelemetry — consistent signal foundation for AI correlation (opentelemetry.io)
▸ Blameless RCA templates — 'did AI help or mislead?' as a standard post-incident question

https://neeraja-portfolio-v1.vercel.app/insights/aiops-is-a-reasoning-accelerator-not-an-auto-remediation-system

If you disagree, I want to hear it. The best version of this thinking comes from pushback.

devops #sre #observability #platformengineering

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