ActionNex: A Virtual Outage Manager for Cloud

Authors:Zhenfeng Lin, Haoji Hu, Ming Hao, Xuchao Zhang, Ryan Zhang, Junhao Li, Ze Li, Oleg Kulygin, Chetan Bansal, Hatay Tuna, Murali Chintalapati, Sheila Jiang, Salman Zafar, Angie Anderson View PDF HTML (experimental) Abstract:Outage management in large-scale cloud operations remains heavily manual, requiring rapid triage, cross-team coordination, and experience-driven decisions under partial observability. We present \textbf{ActionNex}, a production-grade agentic system that supports end-to-end outage assistance, including real-time updates, knowledge distillation, and role- and stage-conditioned next-best action recommendations. ActionNex ingests multimodal operational signals (e.g., outage content, telemetry, and human communications) and compresses them into critical events that represent meaningful state transitions. It couples this perception layer with a hierarchical memory subsystem: long-term Key-Condition-Action (KCA) knowledge distilled from playbooks and historical executions, episodic memory of prior outages, and working memory of the live context. A reasoning agent aligns current critical events to preconditions, retrieves relevant memories, and generates actionable recommendations; executed human actions serve as an implicit feedback signal to enable continual self-evolution in a human-agent hybrid system. We evaluate ActionNex on eight real Azure outages (8M tokens, 4,000 critical events) using two complementary ground-truth action sets, achieving 71.4\% precision and 52.8-54.8\% recall. The system has been piloted in production and has received positive early feedback. Subjects: Artificial Intelligence (cs.AI) Cite as: arXiv:2604.03512 [cs.AI] (or arXiv:2604.03512v1 [cs.AI] for this version) https://doi.org/10.48550/arXiv.2604.03512 arXiv-issued DOI via DataCite (pending registration) Submission history From: Haoji Hu [view email] [v1] Fri, 3 Apr 2026 23:19:11 UTC (2,186 KB)