Prompt Guide¶
Get the most out of Tessa with the right questions. This guide covers 30+ example prompts organized by category, plus tips for effective prompting.
Health and Status¶
Start here when you open IAPM and want a quick picture of your system.
| Prompt | What Tessa Does |
|---|---|
| "How is my system doing?" | Runs a full health check across all services |
| "Is anything unhealthy right now?" | Highlights services with active issues |
| "Are there any active alerts?" | Pulls current and recent alert activity |
| "Give me a status report" | Summarizes health, alerts, and any notable trends |
| "Is there pressure building anywhere?" | Detects services approaching failure thresholds |
Troubleshooting¶
When something is wrong and you need to find out why.
| Prompt | What Tessa Does |
|---|---|
| "Why is checkout slow?" | Traces the checkout flow and identifies bottlenecks |
| "What's causing 500 errors on payment-service?" | Analyzes error traces and correlates with recent changes |
| "Root cause the latency spike at 2pm" | Builds a timeline and traces causation |
| "Why did order-service start failing?" | Checks deployments, dependencies, and resource usage |
| "What's wrong here?" (standing near a node in 3D) | Diagnoses the service you're looking at |
| "Is this related to the database?" | Checks dependency chain for database involvement |
| "What changed right before errors started?" | Scans for deployments, config changes, and traffic shifts |
Performance Analysis¶
Understand trends, patterns, and how your system is performing over time.
| Prompt | What Tessa Does |
|---|---|
| "Show me the latency trend for auth-service" | Charts latency over recent history and flags anomalies |
| "How has error rate changed over the last 6 hours?" | Analyzes error rate trends with context |
| "What are the slowest endpoints?" | Ranks endpoints by response time |
| "Show me the top 10 slowest endpoints in the last hour" | Filters and ranks with a time window |
| "Is response time getting worse on /api/users?" | Evaluates the trend direction and significance |
| "What's the throughput trend for the database?" | Analyzes database call volume over time |
Comparison¶
Compare time windows to understand what changed.
| Prompt | What Tessa Does |
|---|---|
| "Compare the last hour to yesterday at this time" | Side-by-side comparison of key metrics |
| "How does today compare to last Monday?" | Cross-day comparison for recurring patterns |
| "Is performance better or worse than last week?" | Trend comparison with directional summary |
| "Compare pre-deployment to post-deployment" | Finds recent deployments and compares before/after |
Exploration and Discovery¶
Learn about your system architecture and data flows.
| Prompt | What Tessa Does |
|---|---|
| "Show me the service dependency map" | Visualizes how services connect |
| "What services depend on order-service?" | Maps upstream dependencies |
| "Map out the request path from gateway to database" | Traces the full request flow |
| "What are the downstream dependencies of auth-service?" | Maps what auth-service calls |
| "Build me a timeline of events in the last hour" | Assembles a chronological event view |
| "What deployments happened today?" | Lists recent deployment activity |
Contextual Questions (3D)¶
These work best in IAPM 3D, where Tessa uses your position and view as context.
| Prompt | What Tessa Does |
|---|---|
| "What's wrong here?" | Diagnoses whatever you're looking at |
| "Tell me about this service" | Describes the service node nearest to you |
| "Why is this trace so slow?" (in Diagnostics Room) | Analyzes the trace you're currently viewing |
| "What connects to this?" | Maps dependencies for the service in front of you |
Tips for Effective Prompting¶
Be specific about time¶
Tessa defaults to recent data, but specifying a time window gets you more targeted results.
- "What happened between 2pm and 3pm?"
- "Show me the last 6 hours of latency on payment-service"
- "What happened?" (too vague - Tessa will ask for clarification)
Name your services¶
Use the actual service names from your Grid. Tessa matches against your service catalog.
- "Why is order-service slow?"
- "Why is the ordering thing slow?"
Ask follow-ups naturally¶
Tessa remembers the conversation. You don't need to repeat context.
- First: "Why is checkout slow?"
- Follow-up: "Is it related to the database?"
- Follow-up: "When did this start?"
- Follow-up: "Compare to yesterday"
Combine question types¶
Some of the most powerful queries combine multiple angles.
- "Why is checkout slow, and did anything change recently that could explain it?"
- "Show me the service map and highlight anything unhealthy"
- "Compare this hour to yesterday and tell me what's different"
Commands Quick Reference¶
These are typed commands, not natural language prompts. They are handled locally, not sent to the AI.
| Command | Effect |
|---|---|
/mute | Mute voice output |
/unmute | Enable voice output |
/voice | Toggle voice on/off |
/hat <name> | Wear a hat (coder, architect, researcher, reviewer, security) |
/hat list | List available hats |
/hat off | Remove current hat |
/image <path> | Analyze an image file |
/paste | Analyze image from clipboard |
/clear | Clear conversation history |
/sessions | List previous sessions |
/session new | Start a new session |
/session restore <N> | Restore a previous session |
What Tessa Cannot Do¶
Being transparent about limits helps set the right expectations:
- She cannot modify your infrastructure - Tessa can read, write, and edit files in your workspace (Code Fix), but she does not deploy, restart services, or make infrastructure changes.
- She cannot access data outside your Grid - Tessa only sees telemetry data that flows into your connected Grid.
- She cannot predict the future - Tessa identifies trends and pressure, but she reports on what is happening and what has happened, not what will happen.
- Code fixes require Analyze+ plan - On Start and Visualize plans, Tessa describes problems but does not generate code fix suggestions.
- Infrastructure analysis requires Fuse plan - Deep infrastructure diagnostics are only available on the Fuse tier.