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. MIT licensed.

Governed AI-ops for GPU inference clusters — vLLM (OpenAI API + Prometheus /metrics) and Ray Serve / Ray Jobs (Ray dashboard), plus the single-process serving engines SGLang and TGI (Text Generation Inference) — with a built-in governance harness: unified audit log, policy engine, token/runaway budget guard, undo-token recording, and descriptive risk-tier labels on every audit row. It parses each engine's Prometheus /metrics directly (no Prometheus server required) and probes the Ray dashboard independently. A bearer token is optional (many stacks run open).

Serving engines. vLLM is the flagship (full Ray Serve control plane: scale, drain, autoscale, LoRA, hot-swap). SGLang and TGI are supported for engine-agnostic observability — health, running-model identity, request-latency metrics, queue depth, and latency RCA — read from each engine's own endpoints and metric names. Being single-process servers, they have no Ray-shaped scale/drain API: those writes return a teaching error pointing you at a real horizontal-scale layer (Ray Serve / Kubernetes / a load balancer).

What it does

The flagship value is root-cause analysis, wrapped in guarded reads and writes:

• diagnose_latency_spike (flagship RCA) — when TTFT/TPOT/e2e latency climbs, it correlates queue depth (running vs waiting), KV-cache pressure / preemptions, and prefix-cache locality into a ranked cause plus the specific knob to turn (add replicas, raise max-num-seqs, fix routing, enlarge KV cache). Every flag is a number, not a black-box verdict.

• diagnose_low_utilization — the inverse: idle GPUs, over-provisioned replicas, or routing that strands a cache-warm replica → what to scale down.

• Prometheus-native — reads vLLM's /metrics endpoint directly; no Prometheus/Grafana deployment needed.

• Governance-grade — the first governance-grade entrant in this niche: audit + budget + risk-tier approval + undo-token + prompt-injection sanitize, with dry-run + double-confirm on the fragile prod ops (scale-down, scale-to-zero, drain, redeploy, hot-swap) the community reports as dangerous.

• Laptop self-test — ~80% of the tool self-tests free: vLLM on a single GPU or CPU-mock + Ray in one local container (ray start --head).

Related MCP server: RHOAI Observability MCP

What this tool does, and does not, decide

It delivers inference-cluster operations — reads and writes — accurately and efficiently, and records every one of them. It does not decide whether a write is allowed to happen. That is the agent's judgement, or the permission of the environment you connect it with: restrict the network path so it can only reach the read/metrics endpoints, or run the Ray dashboard without its job-submission API, and the writes fail at the server — the place that actually owns the permission.

So there is no read-only switch, no policy file, no approval gate to configure. The one thing the tool guarantees is that nothing is silent: every call, over MCP and over the CLI alike, lands an audit row in ~/.inference-aiops/audit.db, and destructive writes still capture their before-state and record an inverse where one exists.

Each tool declares a risk_level, kept in agreement with its [READ]/[WRITE] documentation tag by a test, and carried into the audit row as a descriptive tier — so a reviewer can see at a glance that a row was a high-risk scale-to-zero. It is a label, not a gate.

Running a smaller / local model? See agent-guardrails.md — it lists the guardrails this tool enforces for you (so you don't spend prompt budget restating them) and gives a ready-made system prompt for what's left.

Capability matrix (39 MCP tools)

The engine-agnostic group works against any supported engine (including vLLM); use it for SGLang/TGI targets or a uniform view across a mixed fleet. The Ray Serve / cluster / deploy write groups are vLLM-only (Ray control plane) — they teach-and-refuse on a SGLang/TGI target.

23 read, 16 write. High-risk writes (scale_replicas_down, scale_to_zero, drain_replica, lora_unload, model_sleep, replica_restart, model_undeploy, deployment_redeploy) all support dry_run + double-confirm; reversible writes record an undo descriptor.

Sleep Mode requires a dev-mode server. vLLM registers /sleep, /wake_up and /is_sleeping only when started with VLLM_SERVER_DEV_MODE=1. Against any other server these three tools report that the route is absent and why, rather than failing vaguely. Sleep Mode suspends the same model; it does not swap base models — serving a different base model means restarting vLLM with a different --model.

Install

uv tool install inference-aiops          # or: pipx install inference-aiops

Quick start

inference-aiops init                     # wizard: engine (vllm/sglang/tgi) + host + port + scheme
inference-aiops doctor                   # vLLM: probes Ray + vLLM; SGLang/TGI: engine health + inventory
inference-aiops overview                 # deployments + total replicas + queue backpressure
inference-aiops metrics diagnose         # why is inference slow? ranked RCA + the knob to turn
inference-aiops serve list               # Ray Serve deployments + replica counts

Run as an MCP server (stdio) for the full 39-tool surface:

export INFERENCE_AIOPS_MASTER_PASSWORD=...   # only if a bearer token is stored
inference-aiops mcp

The CLI is a convenience subset (init, overview, serve …, metrics …, secret …, doctor, mcp); the full 39 tools are exposed via the MCP server.

Governance

Every MCP tool passes through the bundled @governed_tool harness. It does not decide whether a write is permitted — see What this tool does, and does not, decide above — but it records every call:

• Audit — every call (params, result, status, duration, risk tier, and any approver/rationale annotation) logged to ~/.inference-aiops/audit.db (relocatable via INFERENCE_AIOPS_HOME).

• Budget / runaway guard — a safety backstop, not authorization: token and call budgets trip a circuit breaker on tight poll/retry loops.

• Risk tier — each audit row carries a descriptive tier derived from the tool's risk_level; it is a label, not a gate. INFERENCE_AUDIT_APPROVED_BY / INFERENCE_AUDIT_RATIONALE are optional annotations recorded when set, never required.

• Undo recording — reversible writes (scale, autoscale-config, routing, hot-swap, LoRA load) record an inverse descriptor.

Supported scope + limitations

Behaviour is exercised by the test suite against mocked vLLM /metrics, vLLM OpenAI API, and Ray dashboard responses. ~80% of the tool self-tests on a laptop — vLLM on a single GPU or CPU-mock plus a local one-node Ray head. It has not been run against a live production cluster; see docs/VERIFICATION.md for the live-verification checklist.

Unverified against real hardware / topology:

• multi-GPU tensor-parallel / pipeline-parallel deployments,

• real GPU thermal / throttle telemetry (utilisation is best-effort from the Ray dashboard's /api/nodes),

• multi-node drain and node-reboot orchestration.

The fastest live check is inference-aiops doctor; the full checklist lives in docs/VERIFICATION.md.

Missing a capability?

This is the GPU-inference member of the AIops-tools family (governed AI-ops with audit + budget + undo + risk tiers). If a vLLM or Ray capability you need is missing, or your stack speaks a dialect these tools don't yet handle — open an issue or a PR. Contributions welcome.