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AI Overview

The AI Overview generates concise, AI-powered summaries of your database estate or selected objects. The summary appears at the top of the status panel and provides a quick understanding of the current state.

Overview

The AI Overview uses a large language model to produce a natural-language summary of database health and status. The system collects current alerts, events, and server metadata; it then sends this context to the configured LLM for summarization.

The AI Overview provides the following capabilities:

  • The summary adapts to the selected scope in the cluster navigator.
  • The system caches summaries for five minutes to reduce LLM calls.
  • The system checks the estate for changes every 60 seconds and refreshes the estate-wide summary when the state changes.
  • The panel displays a stale indicator when the cached summary expires.
  • Users can collapse the overview panel; the collapse state persists across sessions.
  • A refresh button forces immediate regeneration of the current summary.

Scope

The AI Overview adapts the summary based on the current selection in the cluster navigator. The system sends different context to the LLM depending on the scope.

The following table describes the available scopes:

Scope Context Sent to LLM
Estate All servers, active alerts, and recent events across the entire installation.
Cluster Servers, alerts, and events within a specific cluster.
Server A single server's status, alerts, and recent events.
Group Servers, alerts, and events within a cluster group.

The estate scope activates when no specific object is selected. Selecting a cluster, server, or group in the navigator updates the overview to reflect that scope.

Server and Cluster Analysis

The AI Overview panel displays a brain icon when a server or cluster is selected in the navigator. Clicking the brain icon opens a full-screen AI analysis dialog.

The analysis uses an agentic LLM loop that accesses monitoring tools to gather data. The LLM can query metrics, fetch baselines, review alerts, query databases, and inspect schemas during the analysis process.

The analysis covers the following areas depending on the selected scope:

  • For individual servers, the analysis examines system resources, PostgreSQL configuration, alert patterns, and metric trends.
  • For clusters, the analysis compares metrics across all member servers and examines replication health.

The dialog displays real-time progress as the AI gathers data from different tools. Each tool invocation appears in the dialog so users can follow the analysis workflow.

SQL code blocks in the generated report include a Run button. Read-only queries execute immediately when the user clicks Run. Write statements display a confirmation dialog before the system executes the query.

The Workbench validates each generated SQL block as the report renders, by planning the statement with EXPLAIN in a read-only transaction that is rolled back; the check never executes anything. A block that fails the check shows the error and replaces Run with a Run anyway button, a statement that PostgreSQL cannot plan in advance stays runnable under a "Not validated" notice, and a block that uses placeholders such as $1, <name>, {{name}}, ${name} or :name is labelled a template and offers no Run button, because it needs values before it can run. The AI Alert Analysis document describes these states in more detail.

An amber brain icon indicates that a cached analysis is available. The system caches analyses for 30 minutes before requiring a new analysis run.

The dialog includes a download button that saves the report as a markdown file. The system names the file using the format {type}-analysis-{name}-{YYYY-MM-DD}.md.

Caching

The system caches overview summaries for five minutes to reduce LLM usage and improve response times.

The system checks the estate every 60 seconds in the background and regenerates the estate-wide summary when the state changes. A change in the server or active alert counts, a blackout starting or ending, or a server restart triggers a new summary at once; other events, such as alerts firing and clearing, trigger a new summary once the current summary is at least five minutes old. The client displays the cached summary immediately and updates the panel when a new summary arrives.

The recent events sent to the LLM cover the last 24 hours and include every event type that the Event Timeline shows, such as alerts, restarts, and configuration changes. The system sends the total number of events alongside a sample of the most recent ones.

Scoped summaries for clusters, servers, and groups are generated on demand. The system returns a cached summary when the cache entry has not expired. The system generates a new summary when the cache entry is stale or missing.

The status panel displays a visual indicator when the displayed summary has passed its expiration timestamp. The indicator signals that the summary may not reflect the most recent state.

A refresh button appears next to the "Updated N min ago" timestamp. Clicking the refresh button forces the system to regenerate the summary immediately, bypassing the cache. The button displays a spinning animation while the system generates a new summary.

Usage Limits

The server limits how many summaries each user can cause it to generate, and how often each user can force a refresh. A user who reaches a limit sees the cached summary for the scope, even when that summary is stale. When no summary is cached, the panel displays a message that says how long to wait before trying again. The administrator sets the limits with the llm.rate_limit.overview options described in the server configuration reference.

Running Without AI

The AI Overview is automatically disabled when the server starts without valid LLM credentials. The web client hides the AI Overview panel and displays a static welcome message instead.

The server logs the following message at startup when AI is not available:

AI Overview: DISABLED (requires datastore and LLM
configuration)

All monitoring, alerting, and dashboard features continue to operate normally without AI.