Effective incident management in large-scale IT systems relies on troubleshooting guides (TSGs), but their manual execution is slow and error-prone. While recent advances in LLMs offer promise for automating incident management tasks, existing LLM-based solutions lack specialized support for several key challenges, including managing TSG quality issues, interpreting complex control flow, handling data-intensive queries, and exploiting execution parallelism. We first conducted an empirical study on 92 real-world TSGs, and, guided by our findings, we present StepFly, a novel end-to-end agentic framework for troubleshooting guide automation. Our approach features a three-stage workflow: the first stage provides a comprehensive guide together with a tool, TSG Mentor, to assist site reliability engineers (SREs) in improving TSG quality; the second stage performs offline preprocessing using LLMs to extract structured execution directed acyclic graphs (DAGs) from unstructured TSGs and to create dedicated Query Preparation Plugins (QPPs); and the third stage executes online using a DAG-guided scheduler-executor framework with a memory system to ensure correct workflow and support parallel execution of independent steps. Our empirical evaluation on a collection of real-world TSGs and incidents demonstrates that StepFly achieves a ~94% success rate on GPT-4.1, outperforming baselines with less time and token consumption. Furthermore, it achieves a remarkable execution time reduction of 32.9% to 70.4% for parallelizable TSGs. Our code and sample data are publicly available at https:\/\/github.com\/microsoft\/StepFly.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Effective incident management in large-scale IT systems relies on troubleshooting guides (TSGs), but their manual execution is slow and error-prone. While recent advances in LLMs offer promise for automating incident management tasks, existing LLM-based solutions lack specialized support for several key challenges, including managing TSG quality issues, interpreting complex control flow, handling data-intensive queries, and […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"featured_media":0,"template":"","meta":{"msr-url-field":"","msr-podcast-episode":"","msrModifiedDate":"","msrModifiedDateEnabled":false,"ep_exclude_from_search":false,"_classifai_error":"","msr-author-ordering":[{"type":"text","value":"Jiayi Mao","user_id":0},{"type":"user_nicename","value":"Liqun Li","user_id":"43104"},{"type":"user_nicename","value":"Yanjie Gao","user_id":"34966"},{"type":"text","value":"Zegang Peng","user_id":0},{"type":"text","value":"Shilin He","user_id":0},{"type":"edited_text","value":"Chaoyun Zhang","user_id":"42387"},{"type":"user_nicename","value":"Si Qin","user_id":"42006"},{"type":"text","value":"Samia 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