FixItFlow Automates Troubleshooting Guide Generation for Cloud Incidents

This paper introduces FixItFlow, an automated system designed to streamline incident response in cloud services by generating troubleshooting guides. Cloud environments frequently experience incidents, demanding quick diagnosis and resolution. Manual creation of troubleshooting guides is often labor-intensive, resulting in incomplete or outdated documentation. FixItFlow addresses this by leveraging large language models to process historical incident data. The system works by extracting diagnostic patterns from past engineer actions and then synthesizing these into structured guides. These guides include verified commands and undergo strict validation to prevent the inclusion of fabricated or incorrect content. This automation significantly reduces the manual effort traditionally required for documentation. An evaluation involving 26 engineers demonstrated the system's effectiveness. Generated guides received positive ratings for clarity from 61.5% of engineers and were associated with a 2.3x reduction in mitigation time for incidents where they were used. These results highlight FixItFlow's potential to enhance incident response efficiency and alleviate the documentation workload for engineering teams.