Nobl9 Assist Labs
Nobl9 Assist is an in-context AI assistant built into the Nobl9 Web application. You ask questions in plain language, and it answers using live data from your organization: SLOs, error budgets, burn rates, alerts, and configuration. It can also draft and apply configuration changes, but never on its own: every change requires your explicit approval in the chat. Nobl9 Assist saves your conversations as sessions, so you can come back to them later.
Nobl9 Assist is available to Nobl9 clients, but AI features must be enabled for your organization before users can access it.
Because it is a Labs feature, it can be unavailable, and its behavior can change without notice. Answers can be incomplete or wrong—double-check results before acting on them.
What Nobl9 Assist does
Nobl9 Assist answers data-driven questions about your reliability. Before it answers a quantitative question, it reads the relevant live data through the same read-only interface as the Nobl9 MCP server, scoped to your organization and your permissions. It works best on questions your data can answer, for example:
- Which SLOs are burning, at risk, or out of error budget right now.
- Why a particular SLO's budget is draining, backed by its recent metrics.
- Which alerts fired for a service, and what alert policies and silences exist.
- How a feature works or how to configure it, grounded in the Nobl9 documentation.
Beyond answering questions, Nobl9 Assist can create, update, and delete Nobl9 objects—each change gated behind an approval card in the chat. Nothing changes in your organization until you approve it, and approved changes run with your own permissions.
Opening Nobl9 Assist
Click Ask Nobl9 Assist in the top bar of the Nobl9 Web application. A chat panel slides in on the right and stays available as you move around the app. You can:
- Expand the panel to full screen or collapse it back to a side panel.
- Drag the panel header to reposition it.
- Close the panel while an answer is still streaming: the conversation keeps going, and the answer is there when you reopen it.
- Open your earlier conversations with Show sidebar in the panel header. For details, see Sessions.
Nobl9 Assist is context-aware. When you open it on an SLO details page or inside a project, it knows what you're looking at and tailors its quick actions to it—for example, What's burning? on the home page or budget and burn-rate questions for the SLO you have open. You can remove the context pill if you'd rather ask organization-wide questions.
Sessions
Nobl9 Assist saves each conversation as a session. A session keeps your messages, the answers, and any approval cards. You can close the panel, reload the page, or come back another day and continue where you left off.
Opening a session
Click Show sidebar in the panel header to open the session list. Recent sessions lists your sessions, with the most recent activity first. Hover over a session to see its full title and the date of its last message. To find an older session, type part of its title in the search field.
Click a session to open it. When you reload the page, Nobl9 Assist opens on a new session, and your earlier sessions stay in the sidebar.
Starting a new session
Click New session in the sidebar, or send /clear as a message. Nobl9 Assist creates the session when you send your first message and names it after the first answer. Until then, the sidebar lists it as Untitled session.
Renaming and deleting sessions
To rename the open session, click its title in the panel header and type a new one. To rename or delete any session, open its actions menu in the sidebar and select Rename session or Delete session. Nobl9 Assist doesn't replace a title you set yourself.
Deleting a session removes it and its messages from your history. If you delete a session by mistake, click Restore session at the bottom of the sidebar. The button is available for 10 seconds after you delete.
Answers that keep running
Nobl9 Assist writes its answer on the Nobl9 side, not in your browser. If you close the panel, reload the page, or close the tab during an answer, Nobl9 Assist keeps writing it. Open the session from the sidebar to see the answer, including any part that's still in progress. To end an answer early, click Stop.
A session runs one answer at a time. Wait for the current answer to finish, or stop it, before you send the next message.
An approval card waiting for your decision is saved with the session. After you reopen the session, you can still approve or cancel the change. If you approved a change and it's still running when you reopen the session, the card shows its progress, and you can send a message once the result is in.
Session context
A session remembers the page you started it on. If you start a session on an SLO details page, Nobl9 Assist treats "this SLO" as that SLO for the rest of the session, even after you move to another page. The context pill shows the page where the session started. When you're on a different page, a hint next to the pill, such as Viewing: checkout-latency, shows the page you're on now.
If you remove the context pill, the session keeps it removed when you reopen it.
What you can ask
Reference resources in a prompt
When your question is about a particular resource, type @ in the message composer to attach it to your prompt. Referencing a resource gives Nobl9 Assist its exact identity, so it can use the intended item even when multiple resources have similar names.
- Type
@, then search for the resource by name. To narrow the results, select a resource type filter. - Select a project, service, SLO, or data source. It appears as a pill in your message.
- Continue writing your question and send it. To remove a selected resource before you send, use the pill's remove control.
For example, reference an SLO and ask why its error budget is draining, or reference a data source when you need help with its configuration.
SLO health and error budgets
Ask which SLOs are healthy, at risk, exhausted, or reporting no data, either organization-wide or within a project. Nobl9 Assist reads the live error-budget breakdown, so answers reflect the current state, and it flags no-data SLOs separately instead of treating them as healthy.
Alerts, silences, and annotations
Ask about fired alerts, alert policies and methods, alert silences, and SLO annotations, including auto-detected anomaly annotations.
Metric trends
For questions like "why is this budget draining," Nobl9 Assist can query recent SLI time series (reliability, budget, burn rate, good and total counts) to explain the trend behind a number.
Drafting SLO and alert definitions
Nobl9 Assist can draft Nobl9 YAML manifests, such as an SLO or an alert policy. It grounds the structure in your existing objects and validates every draft against the real Nobl9 schema. When you ask for a change, it goes straight to proposing it for your approval—see Applying changes with approval. If you'd rather apply a draft yourself, you can always take the YAML to sloctl or the Apply YAML editor instead.
Documentation questions
For how-to and conceptual questions, Nobl9 Assist searches the official Nobl9 documentation and links the pages it used, rather than answering from memory.
Applying changes with approval
When you ask Nobl9 Assist to create, update, or delete something, it doesn't act directly. Instead, it presents an approval card in the chat:
- For a create or update, the card shows the full validated YAML manifest.
- For a deletion, the card names the exact object and project to be deleted.
You decide what happens next:
- Apply (or Delete) executes the change. It runs in your browser with your own credentials, so it succeeds only if your role could make the same change manually. The result—success or the exact error—appears on the card, and Nobl9 Assist reads it too, so it can fix a failed manifest and propose a corrected one.
- Edit YAML opens the manifest in the Apply YAML editor, prefilled, so you can adjust it and apply it yourself.
- Cancel discards the proposal. Nothing is applied, and you can tell Nobl9 Assist what to change.
Nobl9 Assist proposes one change at a time, and every manifest is validated against the real Nobl9 schema before you ever see a card—invalid drafts go back to the assistant to fix, not to you. Deletions are only proposed when you explicitly ask to delete a specific object. Sending a new message while a card is waiting dismisses the proposal.
How Nobl9 Assist uses your data
- Changes only with your approval. The Nobl9 Assist service itself never writes to your organization: a proposed change becomes real only when you approve it, and the approved change is executed by your browser with your credentials—exactly as if you made it manually. Everything else the assistant can do is read-only, and unapproved mutating operations are blocked at multiple layers.
- Scoped to you. Requests carry your identity, so answers are limited to your organization and to data your role can view, and approved changes are limited to what your role can change.
- Sessions are private. Your sessions belong to you and to the organization you started them in. Other users in your organization can't see or open them. Nobl9 keeps your sessions until you delete them.
- Data is data. Nobl9 Assist treats the content of your SLOs, alerts, and annotations as facts to report, not as instructions to follow.
Availability and limits
Nobl9 Assist is available to Nobl9 clients as a Labs feature. Before users can access it, AI features must be enabled for your organization.
- Answers are AI-generated and can be incomplete or wrong. Verify before acting.
- A single answer is bounded in time; very broad questions can be cut short. Prefer specific questions over "summarize everything."
- In a long session, Nobl9 Assist reads only the last 30 messages. Older messages stay in the session, but Nobl9 Assist no longer takes them into account.
- A session holds up to 200 messages, or 100 questions and answers. A full session stays readable. To continue, start a new session.
- You can keep up to 500 sessions in an organization. To start a new one after that, delete sessions you no longer need.
- You can have up to three answers in progress at a time, across all your sessions.
- For large result sets, Nobl9 Assist summarizes the first page of results and tells you more exist rather than fetching everything.