Inference AIops

Disclaimer: Community-maintained open-source project, not affiliated with, endorsed by, or sponsored by the vLLM or Ray projects or any inference-serving vendor. Product and trademark names belong to their owners. Source at github.com/AIops-tools/Inference-AIops under the MIT license.

Governed GPU-inference operations for vLLM (OpenAI API + Prometheus /metrics) and Ray Serve / Ray Jobs (Ray dashboard), plus the single-process serving engines SGLang and TGI — 39 MCP tools, every one wrapped with the bundled @governed_tool harness: a local unified audit log under ~/.inference-aiops/, policy engine, token/runaway budget guard, undo-token recording, and descriptive risk-tier labels on every audit row. The flagship diagnose_latency_spike folds queue depth + KV-cache pressure + prefix-cache locality into a ranked cause and the specific knob to turn; the engine-agnostic diagnose_engine_latency does the same across whatever signals SGLang/TGI expose. Each engine's Prometheus /metrics is parsed directly — no Prometheus server required.

Standalone: the governance harness is bundled in the package (inference_aiops.governance) — no external skill-family dependency. A bearer token is optional (many stacks run open).

What This Skill Does

23 read, 16 write, plus undo_list / undo_apply — 39 MCP tools in total. The high-risk writes support dry_run + double-confirm; reversible writes record an undo descriptor. The engine-agnostic reads cover any engine; the Ray Serve / cluster / deploy write groups are vLLM-only and teach-and-refuse on a SGLang/TGI target (single-process engines have no Ray control plane).

Quick Install

uv tool install inference-aiops
inference-aiops init       # interactive wizard: engine (vllm/sglang/tgi) + host + port + scheme (token optional)
inference-aiops doctor     # vLLM: probes Ray + vLLM; SGLang/TGI: engine health + inventory

Or as an OpenClaw plugin, which installs this skill and its MCP server together:

openclaw plugins install clawhub:@zw008/inference-aiops
openclaw skills info inference-aiops          # expect: Visible to model: yes

Needs uvx on PATH: the MCP server is fetched with uv, pinned to this release.

When to Use This Skill

• Triage a cluster (overview): Serve deployments, total replicas, queue backpressure
• Diagnose slow inference (metrics diagnose / diagnose_latency_spike): rank the cause (queue depth vs KV-cache preemption vs prefix-cache locality) and get the knob to turn
• Find idle GPUs and over-provisioned replicas (diagnose_low_utilization)
• Scale a Ray Serve deployment up/down, scale-to-zero to stop cost bleed, or update autoscale bounds
• Drain a replica gracefully before a node reboot (finishes in-flight requests)
• Load/unload a LoRA adapter; hot-swap a base model (Sleep-Mode swap, captures the prior model)
• Inspect GPU utilisation per node, list/cancel Ray jobs, restart a stuck replica
• Compute cost per million tokens from throughput × GPU $/hr
• Observe an SGLang or TGI server (engine_health, engine_inventory, engine_request_metrics, engine_queue_depth, diagnose_engine_latency) — single-process engines with no Ray control plane

Do NOT use for non-inference infrastructure (hypervisors, storage appliances, backup products, general container workloads, network devices, or OT/industrial equipment) — those belong to other AIops-tools. This skill is scoped to GPU inference serving (vLLM + Ray).

Related Skills — Skill Routing

Common Workflows

1. "Inference got slow this afternoon" (flagship RCA → the right knob)

1. inference-aiops doctor → confirm the vLLM endpoint and Ray dashboard are actually reachable before blaming the model
2. inference-aiops overview → Serve deployments, total replicas, and whether queue backpressure is cluster-wide or one deployment
3. inference-aiops metrics diagnose (MCP: diagnose_latency_spike) → a ranked cause with the measured numbers: is waiting queue depth high (backpressure)? Are there KV-cache preemptions (kv_cache_stats)? Has the prefix-cache hit rate dropped (routing lost locality)?
4. Turn the knob the RCA names, not a guess:
   • backpressure → inference-aiops serve scale <app> <deployment> --replicas N (scale_replicas_up, reversible, prior count captured)
   • KV-cache preemption → autoscale_config_update to lower the concurrent-request cap (reversible, prior config captured)
   • lost locality → routing_policy_update to prefix-aware / session-affinity (reversible)
5. Re-check inference-aiops metrics requests (TTFT / TPOT / e2e) and inference-aiops metrics queue to confirm the p99 actually moved
6. Failure branch: if the fix makes it worse, inference-aiops undo list → inference-aiops undo apply <id> restores the exact prior replica count / autoscale config / routing policy. If diagnose_latency_spike reports no clear cause, the bottleneck is likely upstream of serving — check gpu_utilization for a throttling or shared-GPU problem before scaling anything.

2. Off-peak cost save: scale a deployment down to zero and bring it back

1. inference-aiops metrics requests → confirm traffic really is idle, not just briefly quiet
2. diagnose_low_utilization → the deployments actually burning GPU for nothing, with the measured utilisation
3. cost_per_token → quantify the bleed ($/1M tokens at the current throughput) so the change is justifiable in the audit trail
4. (optional) export INFERENCE_AUDIT_APPROVED_BY=you INFERENCE_AUDIT_RATIONALE="off-peak cost save" → annotates the audit row with who/why; recorded when set, never required
5. inference-aiops serve scale-to-zero <app> <deployment> --dry-run, then re-run without --dry-run → high risk, double confirmation. scale_to_zero stops the bleed but strands ingress — requests will queue or fail until replicas return
6. To restore: inference-aiops undo apply <id> (replays the captured prior replica count) or inference-aiops serve scale <app> <deployment> --replicas N
7. Failure branch: if traffic arrives while at zero, restore immediately via undo — do not wait for autoscale, since scale_to_zero may have been applied outside the autoscaler's floor. If the restore fails, serve status will show the deployment unhealthy; deployment_redeploy is the last resort (high risk, disruptive).

3. Drain a replica before a node reboot

1. inference-aiops serve list / replica_list → identify the replicas pinned to the node you are about to reboot
2. queue_depth → confirm the remaining replicas can absorb the load; if not, scale_replicas_up first so draining does not cause a brownout
3. drain_replica <app> <deployment> <replica_id> --dry-run, then confirm → high risk; the drain finishes in-flight requests before removing the replica
4. Watch replica_list until the replica is gone and request_metrics shows no error spike, then reboot the node
5. Failure branch: if the drain hangs on a long-running request, replica_restart forcibly cycles it — that drops in-flight requests, so only reach for it once you accept the loss. Multi-node drain has not been verified against a live cluster (see docs/VERIFICATION.md).

4. Free GPU memory between bursts with Sleep Mode, then resume

1. model_is_sleeping → is the engine already suspended? null means the engine did not report it — that is UNKNOWN, not awake, so resolve it before writing
2. request_metrics / queue_depth → confirm the engine is actually idle; sleeping a busy engine drops live traffic
3. model_sleep --dry-run, then confirm → high risk. Level 1 offloads the weights to CPU RAM and wakes fast; level 2 discards them, so waking reloads from disk. The undo descriptor is recorded only if the engine was observed awake first — an already-sleeping engine records none, so an undo can never wake something this call did not suspend
4. Verify: model_is_sleeping reports true, and GPU memory has been released (gpu_utilization)
5. Resume with model_wake (medium risk), or inference-aiops undo apply <id> to replay the recorded inverse. model_wake itself records no undo: vLLM reports whether the engine sleeps but never at which level, and guessing between level 1 and level 2 would be inventing a prior state
6. Failure branch: if any of the three tools reports that the route does not exist, the server was not started with VLLM_SERVER_DEV_MODE=1. That is a server start-up flag, not a fault in the tool and not a stale id — restart vLLM with the flag, or leave Sleep Mode off if this is a production deployment that should not expose it.

vLLM has no in-place base-model swap. Sleep Mode suspends and resumes the same model; serving a different base model means restarting vLLM with a different --model. For adapter-level changes use lora_load (reversible) and lora_unload (high).

Governance & Safety

The skill delivers reads and writes and records them; it does not decide whether a write is permitted. That is your agent's judgement, or the permission of the environment you connect it with (a network path that only reaches the read/metrics endpoints, a Ray dashboard without its job-submission API — writes then fail at the server). There is no read-only switch, policy file, or approval gate.

• Audit is the guarantee, and it is not bypassable. Every operation — MCP and CLI alike — is logged to ~/.inference-aiops/audit.db (relocatable via INFERENCE_AIOPS_HOME): params, result, status, duration, and the risk tier. The CLI writes the same row the MCP path does.
• INFERENCE_AUDIT_APPROVED_BY / INFERENCE_AUDIT_RATIONALE are optional annotations recorded on the audit row (who/why); they are never required and never block.
• Runaway guard — a safety backstop, not authorization: the same call looped in a tight window trips a circuit breaker.
• The fragile prod writes support --dry-run / dry_run=True and double confirmation at the CLI.
• Reversible writes (scale, autoscale-config, routing, hot-swap, LoRA load) capture before-state and record an inverse descriptor.

References

• references/capabilities.md — full tool → backend → endpoint → returns reference
• references/cli-reference.md — CLI command reference
• references/setup-guide.md — onboarding, optional token, and connectivity