vm-sre-skills

Azure SRE Agent — Skills, Hooks & Deployment Guide

Last verified against Azure SRE Agent documentation: May 2026

A community starter kit for Azure SRE Agent: 10 VM troubleshooting skills, 18 governance hooks, Bicep deployment templates, marketplace install metadata, and step-by-step guides to get started quickly.

⚠️ Example content — all skills and hooks in this repo were created with GitHub Copilot CLI as starting points. Test and customize for your environment before production use. Use at your own risk.

Azure SRE Agent is an AI-powered operations assistant that diagnoses, triages, and remediates Azure infrastructure issues. It's genuinely powerful on its own — it can reason through problems iteratively, learn from past incidents, run tools in parallel, and adapt its investigation depth to the complexity of the issue.

So why this repo? Because the agent's built-in intelligence works best when combined with your team's specific knowledge. Skills encode your proven troubleshooting procedures, safety requirements, and organizational standards. Hooks enforce governance guardrails. Together, they turn a capable general-purpose agent into a team member who knows how you operate. See Why and When to Use Skills and Why and When to Use Hooks for the full picture.

This repo gives you example skills and hooks you can use as starting points — test, customize, and extend them for your environment. The new .github/plugin/marketplace.json manifest (mirrored at .claude-plugin/marketplace.json) makes the repo installable in one click from the Azure SRE Agent portal.

Looking for more plugins? Microsoft maintains an official set at Azure/sre-agent-plugins (Datadog, Dynatrace, PagerDuty, Elasticsearch, AWS, Azure Managed Grafana, Atlassian Rovo) — installable the same way through the SRE Agent portal's plugin marketplace.

Scope: This repo focuses on skills and hooks — it's not a comprehensive Azure SRE Agent guide. For full documentation on agent setup, connectors, memory, run modes, and more, see the official docs. The repo may expand to cover additional topics over time.

💡 Tip: This entire repo — every skill, hook, Bicep template, and doc — was built with GitHub Copilot. I strongly recommend using it to create your own skills and hooks, customize deployments, and work with the Azure SRE Agent in general. It makes the process dramatically faster. See our guide: Creating Skills with Copilot →

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Why skills?

The agent can reason through problems without any skills. But skills add critical value for production operations:

Benefit	What it means
Consistency	Same diagnostic procedure every time — not variable reasoning across engineers or shifts
Your knowledge encoded	Your thresholds, escalation paths, naming conventions, and architecture details — baked in
Execution + safety	Skills attach tools that actually run commands, with prescribed safety checks before any changes
Structured output	Standardized reports with evidence, severity, and recommendations — ready for handoff or audit

When to create a skill: You have a proven procedure that recurs, involves safety-critical steps, or needs consistent output. When to skip: The problem is novel, one-off, or simple enough for the agent to handle ad-hoc.

📖 Full guide: Why and When to Use Skills →

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Quick start

Get your first skill running in 5 steps. This uses high-cpu-vm-troubleshooting as an example — swap in any skill from the skills table below.

1. Clone the repo

git clone https://github.com/raskip/azure-sre-agent-stuff.git
cd azure-sre-agent-stuff

# Or pull latest if you already have it
git pull origin main

2. Deploy the agent