Experimenting with New Features on the Preview Features Page

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The Preview Features page in Skylar Advisor lets users toggle on and experiment with new features. These features are stable, but ScienceLogic is actively developing and improving them in dialogue with users.

The Preview Features Page

The Preview Features page ( > Account Settings > Preview Features) gives users the option to toggle on one or more new features. Please note that these features are stable, and ScienceLogic is actively developing and improving them in dialogue with users.

These toggles apply only to the current instance, not the entire Skylar Advisor account. 

Image of the Preview Features page.

Click the "Play" icon next to each preview feature to watch a short demo of that feature. Also, some features might require you to refresh your browser before they appear.

The Preview Features page includes the following options:

Agentic Control Plane

Selecting the Agentic option on the Preview Features page enables the Agentic Control Plane page ( > Account Access > Agentic Control Plane). This page lets you monitor any AI agents that you are using with Skylar Advisor. You can view a list of agents, jobs, tools, and health, along with latency information, audit trails, agent limits and bounds, and token spend over time.

Image of the Agentic Control Plane page.

When you enable an agentic tool, Skylar Advisor routes the relevant questions to that tool instead of searching the documents on the Corpus page. Each agentic tool comes pre-loaded with a list of sample questions.

The Agentic Control Plane page contains the following tabs:

  • Health. Displays a system-wide snapshot of the AI agent activity in Skylar Advisor for the selected month: volume, success rate, and latency, compared across agent jobs and direct tool calls. For example, in the Agents section, if the Success Rate is below 90%, an agent might be failing.

  • Tokens. Displays the token consumption for the selected month: totals, per-call averages, range and efficiency, and spend by hour of day.

  • Jobs. Every action that uses an AI agent gets a Job ID, which is listed on this page. You can search by job ID, description, or agent to inspect status, duration, and token usage. Select a job to view more information about that job in an Agent Audit panel; on this panel you can click View Anonymize Request to hide personal data, questions, and device information while still showing resource usage and the complete audit trail. You can also click the Analyze button for traces, logs, and SQL queries to troubleshoot agent behavior.

  • Agents. Lists the different AI agents that Skylar Advisor runs to answer a question. You can enable and disable existing agents, and in future releases you can register new agents and add them to the list of agents. Select an agent in the list to view more information for that agent, including a description of what the agent does, and its privileges, token limits, and time limits.

  • Tuning. Choose how a question reaches the Skylar Advisor agents. Eager sends more questions to the agents for higher spend, while Cautious sends more to the standard answer for lower spend. Balanced is the default, and it is recommended, as it sends data and chart requests, plus everyday device and metric lookups, to the Skylar Advisor agents.

  • Agent Tools. Lists the different types of agentic tools you can use with Skylar Advisor. The agent tools are grouped into Device Telemetry (for a single device) and Fleet Ranking (for all devices, VMs, or interfaces). Select a tool to view more information about that tool, including sample questions for Ask Skylar.

  • MCP Tools. Lets you register and preview external MCP servers that contain a variety of AI tools you can use to analyze your data. When you enable an MCP server, it is added as a resource on the Tools menu of the Ask Skylar prompt box and the Quick Prompts toolbar. This tab only displays if you selected the MCP Tools option on the Preview Features page.

Selecting the Agentic option on the Preview Features page also enables the following features:

  • The Tools button on the Ask Skylarprompt box. When you click this button, a list of AI-powered tools appear to help with your questions and conversations. Select a tool and add any additional information, including the device name in most cases, and click Run to run the selected AI tool.

  • Additional device performance data in an Advisory, Investigation, or Prediction. In these activities, the name of a device will be highlighted in blue text. When you click the device name, a pop-up menu displays options for Memory, Disk, and CPU.  Click one of the options for more information, which appears as an answer in an Ask Skylar prompt box. You can click the View Graph button to see a graph version of the data.

  • AI Agent Quick Prompts. In addition to the standard green Quick Prompts, you can also click one of the yellow Quick Prompts to run an AI Agent tool related to the Ask Skylar conversation. Based on the original question, Skylar Advisor displays additional prompts in green boxes that you can click for additional information.

    Each conversation also has an Audit button that opens a Thread Audit panel that lists the length of the Ask Skylar conversation, with links to the key sections of the conversation.

To control and enforce the behavior of the Skylar Advisor AI agents, ScienceLogic has placed two gates in front of every agentic capability. The first gate is based on the release, where ScienceLogic only releases capabilities that have been vetted as production-ready, and anything unpublished is invisible to the agents. The second gate is based on customer opt-in, where a Skylar Advisor administrator must deliberately enable an agent before users can access it. As a result, a Skylar Advisor AI agent does not run unless it has cleared both the ScienceLogic release gate and the explicit opt-in by the site administrator.

MCP Tools

Selecting the MCP Tools option on the Preview Features page enables the following features in Skylar Advisor:

  • The MCP Tools tab on the Agentic Control Plane page ( > Account Settings > Agentic Control Plane > MCP Tools). This tab provides access to a set of ScienceLogic and external MCP servers that contain a variety of AI tools you can use to analyze your data.

    You can register (add) a new MCP server and enable (configure) the AI tools in an MCP server so you can preview those new features.

    Image of the MCP Tools tab of Agentic Control Plane page.

    If a tool has a gated tag, then that tool must be part of an approval workflow before you can use it.

  • The Tools menu of the Ask Skylar prompt box and the Quick Prompts toolbar contain AI tolls from the MCP servers you have enabled. These options expand upon what Skylar Advisor can query and act on beyond the uploaded documents on the Corpus page.

  • The Toolbox page ( > Advisor > Toolbox). This page lets you view all tools from MCP servers that have been enabled in Skylar Advisor. Select a tool from the list on the left to view more information about the tool, including a short description and the time frame for the data used by that tool. 

    If you find an issue or other data that you'd like to explore further, click the Discuss with Skylar button to send that information to an Ask Skylarconversation.

The "Skylar AI MCP" server is a ScienceLogic MCP server that includes a number of diagnosis and analytics tools. The other MCP server tools listed on the MCP Tools page, such as Microsoft Learn, AWS Knowledge, and Cisco DevNet Content Search, are public servers that have been curated by ScienceLogic.

Integrations

In the Integrations section, selecting one or more of the options enables the Integrations page ( > Account Settings > Account Access > Integrations). On this page, you can add integrations for Slack, Microsoft Teams, and ServiceNow.

Slack and Microsoft Teams

On the Integrations page ( > Account Settings > Account Access > Integrations), you can create integrations with Slack and Microsoft Teams using webhooks. These integrations let users share an Ask Skylar conversation with other users by using the Share a Conversation icon () and the Collaborate panel.

Before you can create the integration in the Skylar Advisor user interface, you will first need to locate a webhook in either Slack or Teams. To locate the webhook, see the documentation for Slack or Teams, or ask Skylar AI using the Ask Skylar feature.

To create an integration with Slack or Teams:

  1. In Skylar Advisor, go to the Integrations page ( > Account Settings > Account Access > Integrations) and click Add Integration. A drop-down appears.

  2. Select either Slack or Microsoft Teams. An integration panel appears to the right.

  3. Complete the following fields:

  • Integration Name. Type a name for this integration.
  • Enabled. To use this integration immediately, leave this option at the default (blue). To disable this integration, click the toggle to turn it white.
  • Advisor Instances. Select one or more instances in your Skylar Advisor system where you want to be able to share conversations.
  • Webhook URL. Paste the webhook URL you found for Slack or Teams.
  1. Click Save.
  2. To test the connection, click the Test Connection button at the bottom of the integration panel.

To send a conversation to a Slack or Teams channel:

  1. From the Ask Skylar prompt box for an existing conversation, click the Collaborate with others icon () at the bottom right. A Collaborate panel appears.
  2. Click the Slack or Teams button. A Send to window appears.
  3. Complete the following fields:
  • Select Channels. For Teams only, select a channel from the list.
  • Title. Type a title for the conversation.
  • Summary. Update the existing summary as needed.
  • Compact Summary. Click this button to have Skylar Advisor optimize the summary before sending it to the channel.
  1. Click Send to Slack or Send to Teams. The conversation is sent to the specified channel, with a link to return back to the Ask Skylar conversation. The conversation is also added to the Shared section on the Recent Activity tab of the Dashboards page. You might need to click the refresh icon () to see the most recent questions and answers in this conversation.

ServiceNow Outbound

You can also enable ServiceNow Outbound to enable Skylar AI to automatically create ServiceNow records from Advisories, accelerating incident response and reducing manual operational handoffs. This feature is still under development.

Ad-hoc File Upload

This feature lets you drag and drop one or more text (.txt) files onto the Ask Skylar pompt box so you can ask Skylar questions using those files as context. For example, you could upload a text file containing log information, and then type your questions in the Ask Skylar prompt box.

Image of the Ad-hoc file upload for Ask Skylar.

Trend Analysis

The Trend Analysis option adds a new panel to the Recent Activity tab on the Dashboards page that charts conversation volume, outcomes, and trends over time for a quick summary of your Skylar Advisor activities. The panel contains a list of commonly used terms and most active users. It also charts conversation volume, outcomes, and trends over time, so you can see how Skylar Advisor is being used at a glance.

The Topics & Trends section contains quick filters that you can use to find similar, related activities. Based on the filter that you selected, the graph and other data below this section update with the filtered data.

Image of the Recent Activity tab on the Dashboard page, with the Trend Analysis highlighted

Conversation Audit

When enabled, this feature lets you click the Thread Audit option from the "More options" menu () at the top right for any Ask Skylar conversation. The Thread Audit panel displays details about the conversation, including the claimed status, the duration of the conversation, and the full token spend for the conversation thread for cost and performance review. 

Image of the Conversation Audit pane.

The bottom half of the Thread Audit panel contains links to any part of the conversation.

Claim and Close

In the Work Items section, you can enable the Claim & Close option to add the ability to claim an Advisory or an Investigation, which means you assign it to yourself. Your name will then appear on the activity next to "Claimed by". You can also close an Advisory or an Investigation when you have addressed it. If needed, you can re-open a closed activity.

Image of the Claim this issue dialog.

This option also adds additional, clickable filters to the Dashboards page: Open, Claimed, Closed, Reopened, and Archived. These filters create an audit trail for your activity, so you can see who changed what for that activity. You can see all of the activities that you have claimed on the My Work filter.

Image of the Recent Activity tab, with the States filters highlighted.

Metrics Enhanced Advisories

When an Advisory or Investigation is generated, Skylar Advisor snapshots the data-lake metrics for the affected devices and adds an AI-analyzed summary to the report. When you click the View metrics button, the data displays as a chart on the Metrics Snapshot panel.

Image of the Metrics Snapshot for an Investigation.

Active Session Tracker

The Active Session Tracker option adds a new button in the top navigation bar of the user interface for an Owner user or higher.

The label for this button lists the number of active user sessions along with the total number of allotted user sessions. Clicking the button displays a list of active sessions, active users, and a Clear Active Sessions button to clear all active sessions.

Image of the Active sessions dialog.