Proactive incident prevention
AWS DevOps Agent analyzes patterns across your incident investigations to deliver targeted recommendations that continuously improve your operational posture and prevent future incidents. Access proactive incident prevention through the Ops Backlog page in the Operator Web App.
How proactive incident prevention works
AWS DevOps Agent evaluates recent incident investigations to identify lasting improvements to prevent future incidents and quicken the mean time to detection (MTTD). The agent analyzes multiple incidents to identify recommendations that may prevent whole classes of incidents in the future, focusing on the most impactful recommendations to ensure they are actionable.
By default, the agent automatically runs evaluations weekly. You can pause the schedule if you prefer to run evaluations only on demand. Manual evaluations are always available, which is useful when a recent investigation warrants a quick turnaround on recommended improvements.
The agent identifies improvements across four categories, shown in the Recommendation Categorization chart on the Ops Backlog page:
Observability – Recommendations to enhance monitoring, alerting, logging, and system visibility to detect issues quicker and more accurately.
Infrastructure – Recommendations to optimize resource configurations, capacity tuning, and architectural resilience.
Governance – Recommendations to strengthen deployment processes, pipeline improvements, testing practices, and operational controls.
Code optimization – Recommendations to improve application code quality, error handling, and code resilience.
This categorization helps you understand where your operational improvements are most needed and allows you to prioritize recommendations based on your team's focus areas.
Benefits
Prevent recurring incidents – Address root causes systematically rather than repeatedly responding to the same types of issues
Reduce operational toil – Free your team from repetitive firefighting to focus on innovation and strategic improvements
Improve system resilience – Strengthen your infrastructure, observability, and deployment processes based on real incident data
Learn from historical patterns – Leverage insights from past incidents to make targeted improvements that have the greatest impact
Agent summary
The Agent Summary in the Ops Backlog page of the Web App provides a description of the outcomes from the last evaluation of recent incidents. The summary explains the number of incident investigations analyzed, which incidents are similar to past ones, and which recommendations were created or updated with new information.
The summary helps you quickly understand what the agent discovered during its most recent evaluation and highlights the most notable recommendations that could have the greatest impact on your operational posture.
Controlling evaluations
You can control when AWS DevOps Agent evaluates incidents and generates recommendations:
Running evaluations manually – Click the Run Now button in the Ops Backlog page to start an evaluation immediately. This is useful when a recent investigation warrants a quick turnaround on recommended improvements.
Stopping active evaluations – Click the Stop Evaluation button in the Ops Backlog page to halt an evaluation that is currently in progress.
Managing recommendations
AWS DevOps Agent provides recommendations in the Ops Backlog page where you can review and manage them:
Viewing recommendation details – Click on a recommendation to open the recommendation details page, where you can see more information about the suggested improvement including the incidents that informed the recommendation, the expected impacts, and next steps. For recommendations with code changes, you can also view the agent-ready specification that can be handed to a coding agent for implementation.
Keep – Click ‘Keep’ to retain a recommendation in your backlog for tracking. This allows you to monitor which improvements you plan to implement and track their progress.
Discard – Click ‘Discard’ to remove a recommendation from your backlog. When you discard a recommendation, you can provide a natural language explanation of why it doesn’t meet your needs. The agent learns from this feedback and uses it to inform future recommendations, ensuring they become more aligned with your operational priorities and requirements over time.
Implemented – Click ‘Implemented’ to mark a recommendation as completed. This helps you track which improvements have been applied and allows the agent to measure the effectiveness of its recommendations over time.
Automatic removal – Recommendations that have not been marked as Keep or Implemented may be removed after approximately 6 weeks if no new incidents would have been prevented by implementing the recommendation. This ensures the Ops Backlog page focuses on the most relevant improvements for your operational challenges.
Recommendation updates – Existing recommendations are updated when newer incidents are found that would have been prevented by the recommendation. Updates may change the recommendation’s priority or refine the recommendation based on new insights.
Agent-ready specifications
For recommendations that involve code or configuration changes, AWS DevOps Agent can generate an agent-ready specification. This specification provides a structured document that can be handed directly to a coding agent for implementation.
The specification includes:
Problem statement – A summary of the issue and its root cause
Solution summary – A high-level description of the recommended approach
Target repositories – The specific repositories where changes need to be made
Code changes – Detailed descriptions of what needs to change and why, with specific file paths and implementation considerations
Test requirements – What scenarios need to be tested
Implementation plan – A phased approach to implementing the changes
Agent-ready specifications accelerate implementation by providing coding agents with the context they need to make production-ready changes without requiring extensive back-and-forth with engineers.
Implementing recommendations
To maximize the value of proactive incident prevention recommendations, consider the following practices for acting on them:
Using agent-ready specifications – For recommendations with code changes, use the generated specification to accelerate implementation by handing it to a coding agent or using it as a detailed guide for manual implementation.
Adding recommendations to your ticket backlog – Copy recommendations to your team's ticketing system or project management tool to ensure they are prioritized alongside other engineering work.
Prioritizing recommendations based on impact – Focus first on recommendations that address the most frequent or severe incident types, or those that affect critical systems.
Tracking implementation progress – Monitor which recommendations have been implemented and measure their effectiveness by observing whether similar incidents decrease over time.
Coordinating with development teams – Share recommendations with the appropriate teams who own the affected systems, ensuring they have the context and resources needed to implement improvements.
