Curator's Deep Recall

The Persistence of Ghosts

In SRE, some issues aren't new; they are just forgotten. A "Ghost Error"—a subtle, intermittent 503 response from our legacy payment gateway—had been surfacing once every few months since mid-2024. Most triage sessions ended in "No Root Cause Found" because the signals was too brief to analyze in real-time.

The **Curator Agent** was built to solve the "Amnesia Problem." It doesn't just log data; it indexes the context of every triage attempt into a vector database (ChromaDB), creating a permanent institutional memory of systemic behavior.

Connecting the Dots

During a recent flare-up, the Curator Agent performed a semantic similarity search on the current Jaeger trace. Instead of looking for exact error codes, it looked for **structural patterns** in the span timing.


                // Semantic Search Logic
                results = Curator.search(
                   collection="incident_memory",
                   query_embedding=get_embedding(current_trace),
                   n_results=1
                )

The Curator found a 98.4% match with a closed-but-unsolved ticket from **June 2024**. The linked data included a partial heap dump that had never been correctly correlated.

Analogy // The Librarian Imagine a library with millions of books. A student comes in with a vague description of a character from a story they heard years ago. The Librarian doesn't just check the titles; they understand the "feeling" of the story and find the exact book tucked away in the back of the archive. Curator is that librarian for our telemetry.

Structural Resolution

By linking the current event to the June 2024 data, the Brain Agent realized the error was actually a byproduct of an obscure TLS handshake timeout in an upstream dependency that only occurred during specific certificate rotation windows.

With this insight, we didn't just "fix" the error; we updated the architectural pattern to includes more robust retry logic for TLS handshakes. The ghost was finally laid to rest.

Conclusion

Reliability isn't just about what you know now; it's about what you remember. The Curator Agent ensures that no lesson is ever lost, transforming every failure into a stepping stone toward a more resilient future.