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Overview

Annie automatically learns from your connected integrations (AWS, Terraform, Datadog, etc.), but some knowledge isn’t available in those systems — team conventions, business context, runbook locations, on-call contacts, and tribal knowledge. Custom Knowledge lets you add this context so Annie can provide more accurate and relevant responses. It works in three tiers, depending on the size and nature of the information.

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Three Tiers of Knowledge

Knowledge Entries

Short pointers and guidelines injected directly into Annie’s context. Best for concise rules, team conventions, and quick references.20,000 character limit across all entries.

Knowledge Dumps

Larger structured data that Annie can query on demand. Not injected into context — written to Annie’s working directory at the start of each conversation.CSV with headers and JSON are the recommended formats. Up to 20 dumps per project.

Knowledge Platforms

For full documentation libraries, connect Annie to your knowledge platform. Annie searches these on demand during investigations.Examples: Jira, Confluence, Guru.

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Knowledge Entries

Knowledge entries are injected directly into Annie’s context at the start of every conversation. Because they consume context space, they should be kept concise — think pointers and guidelines rather than full documents. Best for:
  • Team conventions and naming standards
  • Key contacts and escalation paths
  • Quick reference rules (e.g., “always check Redis before the database”)
  • Links to important dashboards or runbooks

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Examples

# Service Ownership
- Payment service: @payments-team, escalate to payments-oncall@company.com
- Auth service: @platform-team, security issues go to security@company.com
- API Gateway: @infra-team

# Debugging Conventions
- Always check Datadog dashboard "Service Overview" first
- For database issues: check pg_stat_statements before scaling
- Redis issues: check eviction rate, not just memory usage
- Stripe timeouts: check Stripe status page before investigating internally

# Incident Severity
- SEV1: Customer-facing outage, all hands. Escalate to VP after 1 hour.
- SEV2: Degraded service, on-call + team lead. Postmortem within 48h.
- SEV3: Minor issue, on-call only.
- Comms channel: #incidents (Slack), war room auto-created as #incident-{id}

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Knowledge Dumps

Knowledge dumps are for larger structured data that Annie can read on demand. They are not injected into Annie’s context — instead, they are written as files to Annie’s working directory. Annie’s context includes a summary of each dump (format, size, columns) so it knows what’s available and can query the files using jq when needed. Best for:
  • Service mapping tables
  • On-call rosters
  • Environment configuration indexes
  • Resource inventories
CSV with headers and JSON are the recommended formats. Annie automatically detects the format and converts CSVs to JSONL for efficient querying.

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Examples

service_name,owner,tier,environment,dependencies,dashboard
payment-api,@payments-team,critical,prod,stripe;redis;dynamodb,Payment Overview
auth-service,@platform-team,critical,prod,auth0;redis;postgres,Auth Health
order-processor,@commerce-team,high,prod,postgres;sqs;payment-api,Order Pipeline
notification-svc,@platform-team,medium,prod,ses;sqs,Notifications

team,primary,secondary,escalation_contact,schedule_link
payments,alice@company.com,bob@company.com,payments-oncall@company.com,https://pagerduty.com/schedules/payments
platform,charlie@company.com,diana@company.com,platform-lead@company.com,https://pagerduty.com/schedules/platform
data,eve@company.com,frank@company.com,data-oncall@company.com,https://pagerduty.com/schedules/data

{
  "environments": {
    "prod": {
      "region": "us-east-1",
      "account_id": "123456789",
      "vpc_id": "vpc-abc123",
      "maintenance_window": "Sundays 2-4 AM UTC"
    },
    "staging": {
      "region": "us-east-1",
      "account_id": "987654321",
      "vpc_id": "vpc-def456",
      "maintenance_window": "No restrictions"
    }
  }
}

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Knowledge Platforms

For full documentation libraries that are too large for knowledge entries or dumps, connect Annie to your knowledge platform. Annie searches these on demand during investigations.

Jira

Search tickets, issues, and project documentation.

Confluence

Search wiki pages, runbooks, and team documentation.

Guru

Search verified knowledge cards and team documentation.

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