Agentic Investigation

What it is

Agentic investigation is the use of an AI agentAI AgentSoftware that plans, uses tools, and acts toward a goal instead of answering one prompt. to diagnose a customer issue rather than just retrieve an answer. The agent forms hypotheses, queries logsLogsTimestamped records of events a system emits as it runs. and traces, reads the relevant code, checks recent deploys, and narrows down to a root cause with the evidence attached.

Why it matters

Retrieval tools stop at what's already written down. The hardest tickets are about things nobody has documented yet: a new regressionRegressionA bug where something that used to work stops working after a change., an edge case in one customer's config. Those are the tickets that end up in engineering's queueQueueA list of tickets waiting to be picked up by a team or agent., and investigation is the only way to close them faster.

Best practices

1. Start from the customer's symptom – Feed the agent the ticket, the account, and the time window so it can scope its search.
2. Show the trail – A good investigation reads like a short incidentIncidentAn unplanned disruption or degradation of a service that needs an urgent response. note: what was checked, what was ruled out, what was found.
3. Measure on escalations – Judge it by how many engineering escalationsEngineering EscalationA ticket support hands to engineering because it needs code-level investigation. it prevents or shortens, not by deflection alone.

How Decimal helps

Investigation is Decimal's core. It connects to code, observabilityObservabilityHow well you can understand a system's internal state from the data it emits., ticketing, and data sources so each ticket gets a cited diagnosis, not a guess.