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Overview

Annie Instructions let you define automation rules that control what Annie does when it receives messages from tracked sources (bots, users, or integrations). Rules determine whether Annie investigates, responds as a chat, offers a manual action, or stays silent. Each rule follows a simple pattern:
If [source] sends [condition] then Annie [action]
Annie already knows your infrastructure from connected integrations and learned patterns — instructions tell it what to do and how to respond in specific situations.

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How It Works

Message arrives → Annie evaluates rules top-to-bottom → First match wins
  1. Annie checks each rule in order (top = highest priority).
  2. The first rule whose condition matches determines the action.
  3. If no rule matches, Annie’s AI decides between RCA and Chat automatically.
  4. Default instructions are appended as extra context to any response.

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Action Types

When a rule matches, Annie takes one of these actions:
Annie’s AI decides whether to run an RCA investigation or respond as a chat — the rule just provides extra context to guide the response.Best for: general-purpose rules where you want Annie to adapt based on the message content.
Annie performs a full root cause analysis, querying your connected integrations (Datadog, Grafana, AWS, etc.) to investigate the alert.Best for: alerts that always need deep investigation.
Annie responds conversationally, using the rule’s instructions as a processing prompt. The original message provides the context.Best for: validation questions, quick lookups, or automated workflows that need a direct answer rather than a full investigation.
Annie acknowledges the alert but doesn’t investigate automatically. It shows a “Start RCA” button so a team member can trigger the investigation when ready.Best for: low-priority alerts or noisy sources where you want human-in-the-loop.
Annie does nothing — no message, no reaction, no response. The alert is completely ignored.Best for: known noise, test alerts, or bot messages that don’t need attention.

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Source Scoping

Rules can be scoped to specific tracked sources:
  • Anyone: the rule applies to all messages (global rule).
  • Specific source: the rule only evaluates for messages from that bot or user.
When you subscribe a new bot or user to Annie, a catch-all “any message → Run Investigation” rule is automatically created for that source. You can then customize it — change the action, add more specific rules above it, or delete it.

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Page Layout

The instructions page has three sections:

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Default Action

Extra context that Annie always includes in its responses. This is not a rule — it doesn’t determine what Annie does, only how it responds. Use it for formatting preferences, team conventions, or baseline investigation steps.
FieldDescriptionExample
InstructionsWhat Annie should always consider”Always check CloudWatch logs first”
FormattingHow Annie structures responses”Use bullet points, include severity”

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Rules

An ordered list of automation rules. First match wins — drag to reorder priority. Each rule defines:
  • Source: which tracked bot/user triggers this rule (or “anyone”)
  • Condition: natural language description of when to match
  • Action: what Annie does when matched
  • Instructions (optional): extra context for the action

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Duplicate Alert Detection

A time window for suppressing repeated alerts. When enabled, Annie detects if the same alert was already processed recently and links to the existing investigation instead of starting a new one.

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Examples

A common pattern for teams using Amazon Q to forward AWS Health Events to Slack:Setup:
  1. Subscribe the Amazon Q bot to Annie
  2. Create rules:
PrioritySourceConditionAction
1Amazon QAWS Health Event with RDSAsk Annie: “Validate whether the reported service had a real failure”
2Amazon Qany messageSilently ignore
Annie validates RDS health events and silently ignores everything else from Amazon Q.
Source: anyone
Condition: Alert contains "RDS" or "database" or "postgres"
Action: Run Investigation

Instructions:
- Check recent schema migrations in the last 24h
- Review connection pool metrics and active connections
- Look for long-running queries (>30s)
- Check for recent deployments that might have changed queries

Source: anyone
Condition: PagerDuty priority not P1 or P2
Action: Offer manual RCA
Annie shows a “Start RCA” button instead of investigating automatically. Team members can click to investigate when they have time.
Source: anyone
Condition: Alert tags contain "test"
Action: Silently ignore
Annie completely ignores test alerts — no response, no reaction.
For teams that have a Slack workflow bot forwarding alerts to Annie:
PrioritySourceConditionAction
1Workflow BotCritical production errorRun Investigation with instructions: “Focus on recent deployments”
2Workflow Botany messageAnnie chooses
Critical errors get immediate RCA with deployment focus. Everything else gets Annie’s best judgment.

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