Why OnCall teams Needs Causal AI

When Microsoft introduced the Azure SRE Agent at Build, it felt like a milestone—finally, a hyperscaler acknowledging what practitioners have known for years:

SRE today is still far too manual.

But here’s the thing: automation alone won’t change that.

Most AI in observability today is built to summarize, not to understand. It aggregates logs, identifies outliers, maybe correlates spikes with recent deployments. But it can’t answer the one question that actually matters during an incident:

Why did this happen?

That’s the gap Causal AI is designed to close.

What Causal AI Actually Means

Causal AI isn't just a buzzword. It’s a class of systems that go beyond correlation to infer causation—what caused what, not just what happened near what.

In the context of SRE, it’s the difference between:

• “Error rate spiked after the deploy” and
• “This deploy introduced a dependency loop that led to memory saturation in service X, which cascaded into degraded response times for customer-facing service Y.”

Causal AI doesn’t just see data—it tries to explain it.

This is not trivial. It requires reasoning across time, structure, interaction, and behavior. Let’s break that down.

The Five Dimensions of Causality in Production Systems

To understand how Causal AI can assist SREs, it helps to think in layers of causality. Each one adds nuance and depth to incident analysis.

1. Temporal Causality: What Happened When?

This is the most intuitive form of causal reasoning. If metric A changed before metric B, and it happens consistently, we begin to suspect A influences B. But production systems are noisy. Timing alignment is rarely perfect.

Causal AI here isn’t just doing timestamp comparison—it’s identifying patterns of lagged relationships,

e.g.: Deployment → latency increase → retry spike → queue depth saturation

Temporal causality is foundational because it helps build timelines, establish probable triggers, and identify sequences that recur across incidents.

Human analog: The first question we ask post-incident is often, “What changed before this started?

2. Structural Causality: What Changed in the System’s Topology?

This layer focuses on the system graph—dependencies, configurations, runtime connections.

Think:

• A new microservice was introduced.
• A data flow changed from async to sync.
• A monitoring agent was removed from a critical host.

Structural causality looks for deltas in how the system is composed or connected. It’s not about what failed—it’s about what’s different. And that difference may explain an increased error budget burn rate—even before a specific metric trips.

Human analog: "This didn’t happen yesterday. What changed in our system graph?"

3. Multi-Hop and Transitive Causality: How Does the Impact Propagate?

Real failures cascade.

An upstream timeout may cause retries, which clog queues, which increase latency downstream, which eventually leads to customer-visible issues. Causal chains are rarely linear. This is where Causal AI shines over traditional observability tools. It doesn’t stop at what is degraded—it asks:

• Where did this originate?
• How far did it travel?
• Who is experiencing the consequences now?

This reasoning mirrors what experienced SREs do manually—except machines don’t get tired at 3AM.

4. Service Communication Causality: Where Are Interactions Failing?

Often, the incident isn’t inside the service—it’s in how services talk to each other.

Retries. Timeouts. Load balancing misroutes. Throttling.

Causal AI here models interaction graphs, not just system graphs. It identifies failure at the boundary—not the node:

• API A returns 200, but the data is invalid due to a silent upstream error.
• Service B retries so aggressively it creates a feedback loop.

Understanding communication-level causality is key to diagnosing modern distributed systems, where symptoms live far from their source.

5. Intent and Business Risk Causality: What Actually Matters?

Not all failures are created equal.

A 5% latency increase in a batch process doesn’t carry the same weight as a 0.5% error rate in a checkout API for enterprise customers with a 99.99% SLA.

This is where intent-aware reasoning becomes critical.

Causal AI at this layer doesn’t just understand what broke—it understands who it impacts, what expectations are tied to it, and whether the failure matters from a reliability, revenue, or trust standpoint.

Human analog: "Yes, this metric looks bad—but does it affect our customers?"

Why This Matters Now

SREs already face high cognitive loads.

They work across fragmented tools, complex topologies, and increasing expectations for uptime and speed.

Causal AI doesn’t just promise speed. It promises clarity—a chance to stop chasing symptoms and start seeing root causes with context. It allows us to:

• Reduce incident resolution time
• Prioritize the right signals
• Write better postmortems
• And even prevent incidents through pre-impact detection

But only if we build it thoughtfully. Not as another alerting system. Not as a summarizer. But as a reasoning engine for modern operations.

The Role of Agentic AI

Causal AI tells you what matters. Agentic AI helps you do something about it.

Imagine this flow:

• Causal AI detects a shift in response time tied to a recent rollout
• It identifies impact on high-priority customers
• Agentic AI auto-checks rollback availability, alerts the right teams, or even proposes a mitigation plan

That’s not AI replacing engineers. That’s AI supporting engineers—in the way we’ve always wanted from our tooling.

Final Thought

The future of SRE isn’t more dashboards. It’s systems that understand.

AI won’t make us better engineers unless it reflects how we actually think—about causality, about impact, about trust.

Let’s stop asking “What’s broken?” and start building systems that ask:

“Why did this break—and what’s the next best decision?”

Because that’s where leadership lives.

Not in noise, but in clarity.