Meet @groundcover: put Agent Mode to work where your team already works
Learn about how to set up the Slack and Linear connector with groundcover to use the groundcover agent directly in Slack to retrieve logs, traces, monitor issues, dashboards, and even RUM. Then use the groundcover agent in Slack to perform root cause analysis and file Linear tickets.
Meet @groundcover: put Agent Mode to work where your team already works
There's an assumption baked into most observability agents: give it enough telemetry and it'll find the problem. Telemetry is half the picture. The context that turns a pile of traces into a complete root cause — what a cluster represents, who owns a service, what "normal" looked like last week, the decision someone wrote down in Notion six months ago — lives in the tools around your observability stack, not inside it.
So we built the bridge. groundcover now ships first-class connectors for the apps your team already lives in: Slack, Linear, Cursor Cloud Agents, Pylon, and Notion. Connect them, and the groundcover Agent stops reasoning from telemetry alone and starts reasoning with the same organizational context a senior engineer carries in their head.
That context runs both ways, and that's the whole point. The agent reads from your tools to investigate better, and it writes back into them — posting to a Slack thread, opening a Linear ticket, building a dashboard — which expands the shared knowledge base everyone, including the agent, draws on next time. You give it more context; it gives you more context back. Each pass makes the other sharper.
Connectors, one click, org-wide
You could always wire groundcover up through remote MCP. First-class connectors just remove the busywork. Instead of chasing down API access through an admin, you connect org-wide with OAuth in a single click, and the connector is available across your platform.
One-click OAuth connect. No API keys, no admin ticket — the Slack connector is live for the whole org from the connectors catalog.
Connecting is only half of it. You also control what a connector is allowed to do. From the connector's settings you can toggle off individual tool calls, force certain actions behind an approval gate, or block them outright. So the agent gets access without getting a blank check.
Guardrails per connector. Decide which tools the agent can call freely, which need explicit approval, and which it can never touch.
We'll keep adding to the catalog — OpenAI Codex, Claude Managed Agents, Jira, and GitHub Copilot are on the way. Part of the reason we made these first-class citizens is to spark ideas about what the agent can actually do once it's connected. Everything here was possible over remote MCP; OAuth just makes it a click instead of a project. We hope a catalog inspires the click.
Once the agent can reach your organizational knowledge, not just your telemetry, it understands your systems the way your team does. For example in groundcover, a cluster might stand for a customer. This is the kind of fact that changes how you read every alert, and exactly the kind of fact that lives outside your metrics.
Here's a small example. After connecting the agent to Notion, you can ask it something that has nothing to do with a metric — "what is eBPF and why do we use it?" — and it answers from your own docs.
Organizational knowledge on tap. Ask a question inside groundcover and the agent pulls the answer straight from your Notion workspace.
Connect once, reach everything
The connectors compound. Once you're in Slack, you can pull in Linear too, and now the agent can work an alert and open a ticket without ever leaving the thread — while using the skills you've already built in groundcover. However, we're not trying to replace your coding agents. We're trying to make your observability agent succeed, and organizational context is what it's been missing.
Adding Linear looks exactly like Slack did. Head to the connectors page, hit connect, and because it's an org-wide connector you land on a one-click OAuth authorization page. Approve it, and you're done.
Click connect to connect Linear to the groundcover agent.
Same flow, new tool. Linear connects org-wide through a single OAuth approval.
From Manage, you set Linear's guardrails the same way you set Slack's. Specify which actions the agent can take on its own, which require sign-off, and which are off-limits. The extra control is worth having when the agent can create and change tickets on your behalf.
The same approval model, per tool. Let the agent read freely while gating anything that writes.
Now the tools work together. A monitor fires and drops an alert into Slack, and you ask @groundcover to investigate right there in the thread, alongside whoever else is watching. It works the incident with your full-fidelity telemetry, and when the failure points at real user impact, you can ask it to pull the RUM session so you can see exactly what the user hit.
Investigate in place. Ask for a RUM session in the alert thread and the agent surfaces it.
One click from the thread into the full session replay in groundcover.
You can also ask it to retrieve data, build a widget, or stand up a dashboard on the spot. For example, I ask for the 5xx error rate across the three affected services broken down by service, and it returns the table in the thread.
Data where the conversation is. The agent builds the view and drops it into the thread so nobody has to go hunting for it.
This is the same loop we've talked about with dashboards. When the agent builds a visualization, it's answering a question — and a good chart says more than a paragraph can. Drop it into Slack and it does something a private query never would: it prompts discussion, and that discussion expands the organizational knowledge your agent can later draw on. Meanwhile the dashboards you build teach the agent which data and which queries matter, so its next answer is sharper. Humans ask good questions, the agent turns them into views, those views prompt more questions, and each side keeps making the other better.
From investigation to ticket
With the investigation done in the thread, the natural next step is a ticket. Ask @groundcover to open one in Linear, and here's where the guardrails earn their keep: before it writes anything, it stops and asks for approval on the save_issue call. An agent that can act in your systems should never do so silently, and an approval gate on write actions is the difference between an assistant and a liability.
Nothing gets written without a yes. The agent pauses for explicit approval before creating the ticket.
Approve it, and the ticket lands in Linear with the full root cause analysis attached. In this case the agent traced a ~13-minute ShopIQ checkout outage to a single culprit: a simulate_outage: "true" flag left active in the payments service, which made the external gateway return 503s on every charge and cascaded up through orders-service to the API gateway as a 100% checkout failure. The ticket names the file, shows the exact line to remove, flags a secondary problem (the API gateway was silently swallowing the upstream errors), and lists the follow-ups. That's the context that lets whoever picks it up ship the fix instead of re-deriving the whole incident.
@groundcover returns a link to the finished Linear ticket.
The finished ticket. Summary, affected workloads, evidence, root cause, a before/after code fix, the monitor ID, and next steps — written by the agent from what it found.
Note: This is really a reflection of how we think about the whole product: the integrations shouldn't live in one corner of the app, they should be available wherever you happen to be working. You'll see the same philosophy in the issue drawer, where a single Linear button turns whatever you're looking at into a tracked issue without breaking stride. Additionally, in Notification Routes, where you can define monitors that automatically open Linear issues and delegate them to an agent of your choice; give that agent the groundcover MCP and the loop closes itself, from signal to triage to action. Manual or automated, in Slack or in the UI, the goal is to put the tools right where the work is, consistently, across every surface.
One skill, callable anywhere
You can also run that entire sequence with a groundcover skill — a workflow you define once in groundcover that ties all of these tools together. For example the following skill handles incident investigation end to end: it loads the monitor config, finds the alert's Slack thread, posts an acknowledgment so the room knows someone's on it, investigates traces, logs, metrics, and eBPF bodies in parallel, searches GitHub for the offending code, opens the Linear ticket, and replies in the thread with the link and the one-line fix. Guardrails and fallbacks are baked in, so it degrades gracefully when a tool isn't connected.
An example of an end to end Incident Investigation skill in groundcover. See the end of this post for the complete skill–we hope it inspires you to mirror it and write your own!
The part that makes it feel connected rather than just automated: you can call that skill from inside the groundcover app or from Slack, and either way the agent knows it ran. For example, first we ran the investigation in the app and it produced a ticket. Later we ask @groundcover in Slack whether a ticket already exists, and it checks and tells you it does because it's the same agent with the same memory of what it did, no matter where you called it.
One agent, one memory. A skill run from the groundcover app is visible when you follow up from Slack — the agent already knows the ticket exists and who filed it.
More context in, better observability out
None of this is really about Slack, or Linear, or Notion. It's about what happens when your observability agent stops working from telemetry alone. Connect the tools your team already uses and organizational context flows into your observability — what your clusters mean, what your users did, what your team already decided. The agent then writes back into those same tools: tickets that carry a full root cause, threads that turn an alert into a shared investigation, dashboards and widgets that prompt the next good question. That output becomes context for the next investigation.
It's the same symbiosis we see with dashboards, extended to everything your team knows. You feed the agent context; it hands you context back, in the places you already work. This doesn't compete with your coding agents. It actually complements them by giving you observability rich enough to make code fixes better. Connect your stack and let the synergy between agents and human input begin.
The full skill as promised
Finally, as promised here is the full Incident Investigation skill mentioned above for you to use as you need:
# Incident Investigation — Slack + Linear + Code
## When to activate
Activate whenever the user provides a monitor (entity marker, name, or ID) and says "investigate", "look into", "triage", "handle", or "work on this" — or when the user's personal instructions say to run the full incident workflow on any monitor provided as context.
---
## Execution order
### Step 1 — Load everything in parallel
Fire ALL of these simultaneously:
- `monitors(action="get", monitor_id=<id>)` — full config: Slack channel, severity, metric queries, runbook description
- `load_user_skill` for any matching team ownership skill (match on namespace or workload name in the monitor)
- `execute_gcql_query(data_type="issues", query="state:Alerting monitor_name:\"*<monitor name>*\" | fields _time, monitor_name, state, severity, summary, workload, cluster, env, namespace | sort by (_time desc) | limit 10")` — confirm firing state, get affected clusters/workloads
### Step 2 — Find the Slack thread
- Extract channel name from `monitor.notificationSettings.connectedAppParams` → `channels[0].name`
- `read_slack_channel(channel=<name>, count=20)`
- Find the message with `:rotating_light:` and the **latest `ts`** — this is the thread for all replies
- If no firing message exists, use the latest message `ts` regardless
### Step 3 — Post acknowledgement immediately
```
write_slack_message(
channel=<channel>,
thread_ts=<ts>,
text="<user first name> <user last name> is on this — investigating now. Will update with root cause and ticket shortly."
)
```
Do this before investigation completes — speed matters.
### Step 4 — Investigate root cause
Follow the monitor's runbook description as the primary guide. Run signals in parallel:
- **Traces**: slow spans, error spans, outbound calls — `execute_gcql_query(data_type="traces")`
- **Logs**: error patterns, stack traces — `execute_gcql_query(data_type="logs")`
- **Metrics**: CPU, memory, connection pool — `execute_metrics_query`
- **eBPF bodies**: for external dependency issues, inspect outbound request/response bodies via traces (`request_body`, `response_body` fields)
Produce: what is broken, which clusters/workloads are affected, key evidence values (latency numbers, error rates, token patterns, processor messages).
### Step 5 — Search GitHub for the code change
Try in order, stop when you find a match:
1. Search `groundcover-private` with specific terms from the root cause:
```
mcp_b5fd003056a04a7f9af8aa7e9eaefbec_search_code(
query="<function name OR config key OR token pattern> repo:groundcover/groundcover-private"
)
```
2. Search `infra` repo:
```
mcp_b5fd003056a04a7f9af8aa7e9eaefbec_search_code(
query="<terms> repo:groundcover/infra"
)
```
3. Broaden to the whole org:
```
mcp_b5fd003056a04a7f9af8aa7e9eaefbec_search_code(
query="<terms> org:groundcover"
)
```
4. If all searches return 0 results (GitHub access not yet granted): describe the fix from the runbook + signal evidence. Note the likely file path. Always end with a Cursor suggestion.
Always produce regardless of GitHub access:
- **File path** (found or inferred)
- **BEFORE** code block (broken pattern)
- **AFTER** code block (fixed pattern)
- One sentence explaining why the fix resolves the issue
### Step 6 — Create the Linear ticket
First resolve the right team:
- Check the team ownership skill if loaded
- Fall back to `mcp_e27235ef7a0341f791988abed33d4caa_list_teams()` and match on workload/service name
Then create:
```
mcp_e27235ef7a0341f791988abed33d4caa_save_issue(
title="[<severity>] <monitor name>: <one-line root cause>",
team=<team id>,
priority=<1 for S1, 2 for S2, 3 for S3, 4 for S4>,
description=<markdown — see template below>,
labels=["<workload>", "<signal type>", "<team name>"]
)
```
**Ticket description template (markdown):**
```markdown
## Summary
<2-3 sentence root cause explanation>
## Affected
- Clusters: <list>
- Namespace: <namespace>
- Workload: <workload>
- Severity: <S1-S4>
## Evidence
- <key metric/signal finding 1>
- <key metric/signal finding 2>
- <eBPF or log finding if relevant>
## Root Cause
<one paragraph — what is broken and why it causes the symptom>
## Fix
**File:** `<file path>`
**Before:**
```<language>
<broken code>
```
**After:**
```<language>
<fixed code>
```
**Why this fixes it:** <one sentence>
## Monitor
Monitor ID: <id>
groundcover monitor: ShopIQ — <monitor name>
## Next Steps
- [ ] Apply fix via Cursor → `<repo>/<file path>`
- [ ] Deploy to affected clusters
- [ ] Confirm p95 latency returns to baseline (<0.01s)
- [ ] Consider increasing PAYMENT_POOL_MAX_CONNECTIONS as a secondary mitigation
```
Capture the `url` field from the Linear response.
### Step 7 — Reply in Slack thread with ticket URL
```
write_slack_message(
channel=<channel>,
thread_ts=<same ts as step 3>,
text=":linear: Ticket: <Linear URL>\n\nRoot cause: <one sentence>\nFix: <one sentence — what changes in the code>\nTo apply: connect Cursor to <repo> → <file path>"
)
```
---
## Final response to user
After all 7 steps complete, respond with:
**What's wrong**
- Root cause in 2-3 bullets with evidence values
**Who to notify**
- From team ownership skill (team name, escalation path)
**Code change**
- BEFORE/AFTER block with file path
**Actions taken**
- Slack: acknowledged in thread `ts` in `#<channel>`
- Slack: replied with Linear ticket URL
- Linear: `<ticket URL>` — `[<severity>] <title>`
- GitHub: file found at `<path>` OR "GitHub access needed — fix described from runbook, apply via Cursor"
**Cursor suggestion**
Always end with: "To apply the fix, connect Cursor to `<repo>` and point it at `<file path>`."
---
## Fallback rules
| Situation | Action |
|-----------|--------|
| Linear not connected | Post full ticket spec to Slack thread. Tell user to create manually and connect Linear MCP. |
| GitHub returns 404 / 0 results | Describe fix from runbook + signal evidence. Note likely file path. Suggest Cursor. |
| No Slack channel on monitor | Skip Slack steps. Note it. Suggest adding a Slack notification route. |
| No firing Slack message | Post to channel root (no `thread_ts`). |
| Monitor not currently Alerting | Still run full workflow — note it resolved but create ticket for post-mortem. |
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