Getting Started
Learn how to interact with the groundcover AI Agent
No setup required - the Agent is available directly in the groundcover UI.
Opening the Agent
Click the Agent icon in the sidebar or press Cmd+Shift+A (Mac) / Ctrl+Shift+A (Windows/Linux) to toggle the chat panel. The panel stays open as you navigate the platform so you can ask questions in context.
Press Cmd+Shift+E to expand the Agent to full screen for longer investigations.
Template Cards
When you start a new conversation, the Agent shows template cards - pre-built prompts covering common scenarios like error investigation, performance analysis, infrastructure health, and more. Click a card, fill in the placeholders for your specific workload or namespace, and the Agent starts working.
@Mentions
Type @ in the chat input to reference specific entities. A picker appears with your resources grouped by category:
Workloads - Deployments, StatefulSets, DaemonSets, CronJobs, Jobs
Pods
Nodes
Recently mentioned entities appear at the top for quick access. You can search by name or click a category header to filter.
Investigate errors in @checkout-service Compare latency between @api-gateway and @auth-service
When you mention an entity, its full context (namespace, cluster, environment) is automatically included in your request.
Adding Context from the UI
While browsing the platform, you can send specific items directly to the Agent as context. Hover over any row in a table or open a detail drawer and click the Add to context button (star icon). The item and its full metadata are attached to your next Agent message.
This lets you point the Agent at exactly what you're looking at without copy-pasting IDs or describing it manually. For example, add a failing span to context and ask "why is this span erroring?" - the Agent already has all the details.
You can also paste a groundcover URL directly into the chat. The Agent extracts the full context from the URL - page, filters, time range, and entity.
Exploring Tool Results
As the Agent works, each step it takes - every query, lookup, or action - appears as an expandable item in the conversation. Click on any step to see what the Agent actually did: the query it ran, the parameters it used, and the raw results it got back.
This gives you full transparency into the Agent's reasoning and lets you verify its work, reuse queries, or continue exploring the data yourself.
Suggestions
After completing an investigation or answering a question, the Agent may offer follow-up suggestions - clickable buttons that continue the conversation in a useful direction. Click a suggestion to automatically send it as your next prompt.
Conversations
The Agent maintains full context within a conversation. Ask follow-ups naturally:
You: What's causing high latency in the payments service?
Agent: (investigates and reports findings)
You: Drill into the database calls specifically
Agent: (focuses on database spans)
You: Create a monitor for this
Previous conversations are saved in the sidebar. Start a new one with Cmd+Shift+O.
Sharing & Forking
You can share any conversation with teammates. Right-click a conversation in the sidebar and select Share to copy a shareable link to your clipboard. Shared conversations have an expiration time.
When someone opens a shared link, they see a read-only view of the full conversation. To continue the investigation from where it left off, they can click Continue this conversation - this forks the conversation into a new, editable copy owned by them. The original shared conversation stays unchanged.
Keyboard Shortcuts
Cmd/Ctrl + Shift + A
Toggle the Agent panel
Cmd/Ctrl + Shift + O
New conversation
Cmd/Ctrl + Shift + E
Expand to full screen
Cmd/Ctrl + Shift + S
Share conversation
@
Open entity mention picker
Cmd/Ctrl + /
Show keyboard shortcuts
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