Ogbai, the console assistant
Ogbai is the support assistant in the console. Tell it what’s wrong in a sentence. It follows fixed rules (it isn’t an AI model), looks at your project with your permissions and shows you what it checked. When there is a small fix it can offer one, and nothing happens until you confirm it.
What you can ask
Section titled “What you can ask”| Say something like | Ogbai checks | It can offer |
|---|---|---|
| “I can’t SSH to web”, “connection timed out” | The VM is running, has a public address and an SSH key, and a security group allows TCP 22 from your address | Add the rule: one inbound rule, TCP 22, from your current address only |
| “web is slow”, “high CPU”, “it’s stuck” | CPU, memory and disk I/O over the last 10 minutes | Reboot the VM, when its CPU is above 90% for those 10 minutes |
| “my VM is down”, “start api” | Which VMs are stopped, and why | Start the VM (if several are stopped, it asks which) |
| “what’s my bill?”, “how much have I spent?” | Spend this month by project and the forecast, in your local currency with USD beside it, and stopped VMs whose disks still bill | Nothing: billing is off-limits |
| “I want a human”, or anything else | Open ticket, with this conversation attached |
Name the VM if you can. Otherwise Ogbai picks the only running VM, or the running one you used last, and asks when it can’t tell.
Confirming a fix
Section titled “Confirming a fix”The summary says exactly what confirming does. An offer lasts 10 minutes and works once, for you in this project. Your permissions are checked again when you confirm: Ogbai can’t do anything you aren’t allowed to do yourself, and if you lack a permission it says so rather than offering the fix.
Everything Ogbai does appears in Activity under your
name, with via: ogbai in the event’s details.
What it won’t do
Section titled “What it won’t do”Ogbai can start, stop or reboot a VM, add that one SSH rule, and open a support ticket. It never
deletes anything and never touches billing, IAM or quotas. Ask it to and it offers a ticket
instead. It only sees what your permissions let you read: without compute:DescribeVM, for example,
it tells you it can’t read the project’s VMs.
A rule it adds stays until you remove it, and if your address changes you’ll need another. It goes on the VM’s oldest security group that isn’t the VPC’s default (or the default, if that’s the only one), and every VM in that group gets it. See Security groups.
Limits and permissions
Section titled “Limits and permissions”Ogbai takes 20 messages a minute and 200 an hour from one person. It keeps your conversation for 24 hours; a ticket you open attaches up to the last hour of it, so don’t paste passwords or private keys.
Talking to Ogbai takes the assistant:Use permission, which is in every managed policy.
Confirming a fix also takes assistant:ConfirmProposal, which is in all of them except ReadOnly.
Neither grants anything else.