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Cloud operations are entering a new era. As systems grow in scale and complexity, the traditional model of reactive incident response, where engineers manually piece together signals across dozens of tools and portals, juggling all that context alone, is no longer sustainable. The operational toil required to keep systems running shipping new capabilities.

The question is straightforward: what if engineers could spend most of their time building instead of maintaining?

To help organizations make that shift, today we’re sharing how Zafin, Provation Medical, and InEight are rethinking cloud operations with Azure SRE Agent. The SRE Agent product team has been working side by side with these customers, embedding with their engineering teams to agentify their cloud operations. What follows is the story of that collaboration and the results it produced.

From hours to minutes across industries

We worked closely with Zafin starting October last year. As the onboarding progressed, and Zafin’s scenarios became more sophisticated, Zafin’s security team needed confidence that the agent would respect their access boundaries at scale. We worked closely to configure granular RBAC, and scoping needed for multi-user rollout.

“Azure SRE Agent transformed how we approach incident response. We’ve moved from fragmented signals and manual triage to an intelligence-driven model where agents collect evidence, classify issues, and recommend actions before our engineers even engage. We’ve taken incident triage from hours down to minutes, and we’re now expanding this automation across observability, health monitoring, and incident management. As an AI platform company serving tier 1 banks globally, that speed, accuracy, and enterprise-grade governance is exactly what we need.”

— George K Mathew, SVP Cloud & Business Operations, Zafin

We partnered with Provation on initial onboarding, connecting Azure DevOps as an incident source so the agent could begin triaging production support tickets. From there, they expanded into proactive health checks on their own.

“When software runs reliably, care teams can focus on their patients instead of technology. At Provation, a leading provider of clinical productivity software, we’re continuing to advance our AI-powered software development lifecycle with Azure SRE Agent, Microsoft’s AI-powered reliability service.

When a support ticket comes in, Azure SRE Agent pulls together the context an engineer needs to understand what the system was doing, what code recently changed, likely contributing factors, and recommended next steps. That analysis drops directly into our team’s normal workflow. In its first month, Azure SRE Agent provided analysis for all of our production-related tickets. Instead of checking multiple locations, engineers can start with more context already in front of them, helping work move forward more consistently and efficiently.

Azure SRE Agent also supports our development environments, helping engineers review emerging patterns earlier in the process and create follow-up work with measurable first-month results, contributing to more than a quarter of related investigation tickets during that period.

That’s what AI-assisted software development looks like day to day at Provation: intelligent tools integrated into the systems our teams already use, so healthcare providers get a smoother experience from start to finish.”

— Paul Snider, CTO, Provation Medical

With InEight, our engagement started with an on-site workshop where the agent diagnosed a live production bug their team had been unable to reproduce. That result drove rapid expansion, and we collaborated closely as InEight scaled from one product to multiple products and teams in three months.

“SRE Agent is helping InEight transform how engineering operates. By embedding AI into software delivery, reliability engineering, quality assurance, security, and operational workflows, we are reducing manual effort, accelerating delivery, improving stability, and creating a scalable foundation for future growth. Incident investigation is down 80 percent, build failure triage down 80 percent, and bug investigation down 67 percent. Azure SRE Agent is the only tool we have found that reasons across source code, live telemetry, and Azure infrastructure simultaneously, in a single conversation. For a company operating a large suite of integrated products on Azure, that capability is not incremental. It is transformational.”

— Jim Ellerbeck, Vice President of Technology, InEight

Built on governance and memory

Faster resolution is the most visible outcome, but not the full story. The reason these customers trust the agent with production operations comes down to two things: governance and memory.

Governance is what makes this level of autonomy possible. The agent explains what it intends to do and why before acting, and every interaction produces a full audit trail. Routine operations run autonomously; actions designated high-impact pause for in-workflow sign-off. VNet integration routes traffic through your own network – NSG rules, private DNS, and firewalls all apply – while least-privilege access and granular tool-level policies keep the agent operating under your rules.

Memory is what makes the system compound. Every investigation captures root causes, resolution steps, team preferences, and operational patterns. That knowledge persists across conversations. New team members ramp faster. On-call quality stays consistent regardless of who is paged. The collective expertise of the team grows automatically and never leaves when people do.

From maintaining to building

The pattern emerging from these customers points to a fundamental shift in what it means to run services. Traditional operations are giving way to an agent-driven model where the cognitive burden of monitoring, diagnosing, and resolving issues is lifted.

When the agent handles the investigative toil, captures institutional knowledge, and gets smarter with every interaction, engineering teams can redirect their energy toward building the next generation of products and services. The teams adopting this model are not just operating faster. They are innovating faster, because their best people are no longer trapped in reactive maintenance cycles.

Azure SRE Agent is generally available.

Visit https://sre.azure.com to create your first agent in minutes.