You’ve likely encountered scenarios where pinpointing the root cause of elusive network issues feels like chasing shadows. Complex VPNs, distributed routing protocols, and sprawling hybrid environments often prolong investigation and remediation, impacting service availability. What if an AI agent could absorb your infrastructure knowledge, proactively react to alerts, and troubleshoot or even repair network faults autonomously?

Enter the Azure SRE Agent — an AI-powered Site Reliability Engineering assistant designed to respond intelligently to monitoring alerts. Built on large language models enhanced with custom prompts, domain-specific skills, and tool integrations, it emulates a skilled SRE operator by correlating data, running diagnostics, and automating fixes.

This post explores a hands-on extension of Azure’s SRE Agent to infrastructure networking — not just cloud apps, but the very fabric of hybrid connectivity. Using real-world scenarios, labs, and on-prem device telemetry, we'll examine how this agent understands complex Azure network topologies, integrates SNMP and syslog telemetry, and diagnoses challenging faults like OSPF area mismatches. We’ll also dissect a dedicated repo with Infrastructure-as-Code and fault injection tooling designed to teach and test the agent’s networking prowess.

Architecture Overview

┌─────────────────────────────────────────────┐
│             On-Premises Infrastructure       │
├─────────────────────────────────────────────┤
│ • Network Devices (FRR Routers via containerlab)     │
│ • Telemetry: SNMP, Syslog, RADIUS Logs       │
│ • Jump Box (Command Execution)                │
└─────────────────────────────────────────────┘
                  ↓          ↑
┌─────────────────────────────────────────────┐
│           Azure Networking Environment       │
├─────────────────────────────────────────────┤
│ • Hub-and-Spoke VNets with NVAs              │
│ • VPN Gateways with BGP                       │
│ • Traffic Manager + Application Gateways     │
│ • Custom Knowledge Base + Runbooks            │
│ • Fault Injection & Infrastructure as Code   │
└─────────────────────────────────────────────┘
                  ↓
┌─────────────────────────────────────────────┐
│              Azure SRE Agent Platform         │
├─────────────────────────────────────────────┤
│ • Large Language Model with Custom Skills     │
│ • Integration with Monitoring & Ticketing    │
│ • Automated Troubleshooting & Remediation     │
│ • Environment Awareness (Source of Truth)    │
└─────────────────────────────────────────────┘

This layered architecture enables the SRE Agent to observe real-time telemetry from both Azure and on-prem devices, execute diagnostic commands remotely via VM run-command or integrated VNet access, and use IaC-defined baselines to detect configuration drifts. The agent’s knowledge base includes runbooks tailored for common routing protocols like BGP and OSPF, crucial for hybrid networking fidelity.

Source: Cloudtrooper blog

Key Technical Observations

• LLM-Augmented SRE with Infrastructure Focus — Unlike typical SRE tools focused on application code, the approach here extends the Azure SRE Agent with deep networking domain knowledge and operational runbooks, empowering it to troubleshoot even lower-level network protocol issues.

• Hybrid Telemetry Integration — Leveraging SNMP metrics via Telegraf, syslog, and RADIUS accounting logs closely integrated into Azure Monitor and Log Analytics enables the agent to ingest rich on-prem device data alongside Azure native telemetry, vastly expanding troubleshooting visibility.

• Infrastructure-as-Code as Source of Truth — The SRE Agent benefits from IaC definitions of Azure Landing Zone environments in Bicep, allowing it to detect drifts and unexpected configuration mismatches before they manifest as faults.

• Sophisticated Fault Injection Framework — The repository provides a robust, script-driven fault injector capable of emulating a wide spectrum of real-world failures from NIC and firewall misconfigurations to route table inconsistencies and protocol mismatches, enabling rigorous testing of the agent’s remediation ability.

• Automated Remote Command Execution — By running commands through Azure VM run-command or VNet integration, the SRE Agent can dynamically explore device states and configurations in both cloud and on-premises network devices, a game-changer for infrastructure troubleshooting automation.

• OSPF and BGP Protocol Awareness — The inclusion of detailed runbooks and heuristics for troubleshooting routing adjacency issues (e.g., area mismatches, MTU and network-type discrepancies) empowers the agent to correctly diagnose and resolve complex routing failures that cascade into service outages.

How It Works

Deploying the Hybrid Environment

Using the repo erjosito/networking-sre-agent, the entire hybrid networking landscape is built with Bicep templates, including a hub-and-spoke Azure virtual network architecture interlinked with an on-premises simulated network via site-to-site VPN with BGP. NVAs (Network Virtual Appliances) run on Ubuntu with iptables, App Gateways and firewall policies enforce traffic flow, and Traffic Manager balances endpoints between hubs.

// Sample snippet configuring VPN Gateway with BGP ASN
resource vpnGateway 'Microsoft.Network/virtualNetworkGateways@2021-02-01' = {
  name: 'vpnGatewayHub1'
  properties: {
    bgpSettings: {
      asn: 65001
    }
    // Other VPN Gateway properties
  }
}

This setup mirrors real-world enterprise scenarios with interconnected on-prem routers (simulated by containerlab and FRR), and cloud VNets connected via peering and VPN gateways, allowing the agent to face authentic troubleshooting challenges.

Enhancing Knowledge and Context

The agent is provisioned with a customized knowledge repository containing on-premises routing fault runbooks for BGP and OSPF protocols:

• BGP troubleshooting runbook
• OSPF troubleshooting runbook

By feeding these guides, the SRE Agent understands typical failure patterns, symptoms, and corrective commands, bypassing trial-and-error exploration. Providing detailed environment metadata speeds up alert triage and remediation.

Fault Injection and Automated Diagnostics

The repo includes scripts like inject-fault.ps1 and inject-fault.sh enabling scripted injection of diverse fault scenarios ranging from simple NSG blocks to complex routing protocol mismatches:

.\inject-fault.ps1 -Scenario udr-wrong-nexthop

When such a fault triggers an alert, the SRE Agent queries metrics and logs, runs commands remotely to verify device states, consults its runbooks, and incrementally narrows down the issue — for instance, detecting that a User Defined Route’s next hop IP does not match the expected NVA address, a fault that can easily elude manual operators.

On-Premises Integration

On-premises devices' telemetry streams are ingested via:

• Telegraf SNMP plugin exporting to Azure Monitor as metrics
• Syslog server forwarding to Azure Log Analytics via Azure Monitoring Agent (AMA)
• Radius accounting messages similarly fed to Log Analytics

The agent accesses devices indirectly through a jump box VM via az vm run-command, simulating interactive troubleshooting commands remotely. The new SRE Agent VNet integration promises even tighter connectivity for live diagnostics.

This hybrid telemetry integration and command execution loop empower troubleshooting of OSPF adjacency failures due to area mismatches or MTU inconsistencies that cause routing breakdowns cascading into service outages.

Quick Tips & Tricks

1. Customize Your Knowledge Base Early — Embed runbooks and detailed documentation on your specific protocols and environment nuances to turbocharge the agent’s diagnostic accuracy.

2. Leverage IaC Repositories as Baselines — Integrate your Azure Landing Zone IaC definitions as “source of truth” to flag configuration drift automatically.

3. Use Fault Injection to Harden Tooling — Actively inject real-world faults ranging from routing errors to firewall misconfigurations to train and test the agent’s troubleshooting agility.

4. Streamline On-Prem Telemetry Pipelines — Route SNMP, syslog, and Radius accounting logs to Azure Monitor for unified observability and richer AI-powered insights.

5. Enable Remote Command Execution — Utilize Azure VM run-command or VNet integration to empower the agent with on-demand live device interrogation capabilities.

6. Optimize Alert Frequencies for Responsiveness — Shorten alert evaluation intervals below 5 minutes for faster incident detection and agent response, critical for high-availability networks.

Conclusion

The Azure SRE Agent’s evolution into hybrid network infrastructure troubleshooting marks a compelling leap toward truly autonomous reliability engineering. By fusing large language models with domain-specialized runbooks, hybrid telemetry injection, and automated fault injection/testing, it demonstrates remarkable aptitude diagnosing and repairing complex, subtle networking faults that historically consumed hours of engineer time.

While refinements remain — such as alert deduplication, knowledge base tuning, and production readiness hardening — this work exemplifies AI’s emerging role in network operations, shifting the on-call experience from reactive firefighting to guided, accelerated remediation. As SRE Agents mature, they promise to transform how enterprises ensure resilient, smoothly operating networks across cloud and on-prem realms.

Have you experimented with Azure SRE Agent for infrastructure or network troubleshooting? Share your experiences and insights below!

References

1. Azure SRE Agent for Networking – Cloudtrooper — Original article and deep hands-on exploration
2. Azure SRE Agent official page — Microsoft’s overview and documentation
3. erjosito/networking-sre-agent GitHub repo — Infrastructure as Code, fault injection, and knowledge base
4. Containerlab — Network device simulation framework used for lab environment
5. SRE Agent VNet integration — Microsoft docs on VM/VNet integration for diagnostics
6. BGP troubleshooting runbook — Detailed runbook embedded in knowledge base
7. OSPF troubleshooting runbook — Protocol-specific fault diagnosis guide