In previous posts, we've discussed how AI Advisor Runbooks help teams capture the operational expertise, knowledge, and procedures specific to their networks, enabling AI Advisor to more accurately investigate issues and guide teams toward answers.

Until now, Runbook management was tied to Kentik's legacy user levels, meaning only Admins and SuperAdmins could create and maintain Runbooks. This created an unnecessary barrier to adoption for a very useful feature as the people who know your network best or operate it most hands-on aren't necessarily the administrators of the tool. 

That changes today. With role-based access control (RBAC) for AI Runbooks, organizations can give more team members the ability to contribute their expertise without granting them broader administrative privileges.

But expanding access also requires maintaining control over how Runbooks are managed. Because Runbooks influence how AI Advisor investigates issues and responds to questions, changes to their content can affect the answers users receive. It's important that those changes are authorized, transparent, and auditable so users can trust the knowledge guiding AI Advisor's behavior.

This reflects a broader principle behind our approach to AI: trust is essential to adoption. Organizations need the flexibility to put AI capabilities in the hands of more people while maintaining appropriate governance over the knowledge and instructions those capabilities rely on.

RBAC builds on the safeguards and we're rolling it out to AI Runbooks now, and to Custom Network Context in the near future.
In a nutshell, we are conducting Trus/Safety work around the entire AI stack:

• Visibility into changes, even for users without permission to modify these configurations.
• Version history and rollback, allowing teams to track changes and restore previous versions.
• Audit logging for Create, Edit, and Delete actions, providing accountability for changes.

Together, these capabilities make it possible to expand participation in building AI Advisor's operational knowledge while retaining oversight and control.

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RBAC for Runbooks

If you go to Company Settings > RBAC Management you will notice that Roles now include a new category of permissions titled Kentik AI

You can now create roles with granular permissions around Runbooks: Create, View, Edit, Delete - aka these are not governed by the legacy UserLevel anymore (Member, Admin, SuperAdmin)

Depending on your Runbook permissions, the Settings > Kentik AI left-side panel may have the Runbooks entry disabled: the screenshot below illustrates what it looks like when a user has all Runbook permissions disabled.  

The Settings > Kentik AI > Runbooks screen will offer different functionality depending on a user's RBAC permissions, as displayed in the screenshots below.

Example of the Runbook screen for a user with CREATE, EDIT and DELETE RBAC permissions

Example of the Runbook screen for a user with VIEW only RBAC permissions

Coming up next ?

As you have noticed, we're continuously adding AI Safeties around AI Advisor. Next on our list we'll be adding the following:

• RBAC permissioning for Custom Network Context
• RBAC permissioning for AI Advisor Chat Sessions: this will eventually regulate what AI Chat sessions users have access to (all users currently have access to all sessions)

Let us know what you think!