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BC Telemetry Buddy .. now with (community) knowledge

BC Telemetry Buddy .. now with (community) knowledge

WaldoBusiness Central2 hours ago36 Views

I did a thing .. again ..

A few weeks ago I wrote about building the tool but forgetting the skill. That post kept nagging at me. And the more I thought about it .. the more I thought about one word ..

Knowledge

Think about it .. every time you start a telemetry session with BCTB, the AI starts from scratch. It doesn’t know that RT0005 spikes on Monday mornings are almost always overnight batch jobs fighting over the same table. It doesn’t know that LC0020 during upgrade windows is usually one specific AppSource extension that hasn’t published a compatible version yet.

You know this. I know this. The community knows this. But the tool? Blank slate. Every. Single. Time.

That’s .. well .. dumb

“But waldo .. don’t AI agents already have memory?”

Sure they do. Claude has it. Copilot has it. Most AI tools have some concept of “remembering things between sessions”.

So why not just use that?

Because it’s the wrong kind of memory for this.

Agent memory is personal .. it’s tied to you, in your client, behind your login. Your colleague can’t benefit from what you learned yesterday.

Agent memory is opaque .. the AI decides what to remember and how to phrase it. You can’t review it properly, you can’t version it, you can’t diff it, you can’t PR it. Good luck doing a code review on Claude’s internal memory blob

Agent memory is locked to one client .. switch from Claude Desktop to Cursor? Your memory stays behind. Use Copilot Chat at work and Claude at home? Two separate brains, zero shared knowledge.

And most importantly .. agent memory is individual. The whole BC community has been building telemetry knowledge for years. Just imagine we share that knowledge..

So yeah – I built my own “memory” – which I decided to call “knowledge”, just to not confuse any agent

Here’s what I built.

BCTB now has a “knowledge base“. Two layers, actually.

Community KB: a collection of articles that ships with the tool. KQL patterns that actually work. Event interpretations that save you an hour of guessing. Investigation playbooks for the stuff we all run into. It loads automatically when you start a session. You don’t have to do anything.

Local KB: your own articles, in your own workspace. Maybe you have a customer that does weird stuff on Fridays (we all have that customer ). Maybe you’ve figured out a pattern for a specific ISV extension that nobody else has seen. Write it down once, and the tool remembers it forever. May be you have OnPrem customers () that just needs different KQL to get to their data ..

Both layers are just markdown files. No database, no subscription, no magic. Files in a folder. When BCTB starts, it loads everything into cache. Done.

What does this mean for you?

When you ask “why is my customer’s system slow?” .. the AI no longer starts from zero. It checks the knowledge base first. If there’s a playbook for that exact scenario, it uses it. If there’s a proven KQL pattern, it grabs it instead of hallucinating one from scratch.

It’s like having a senior colleague sitting next to you who’s seen it all before. Except this colleague never forgets and never goes on holiday (pun intended for anyone who will come to my sessions at next conferences …)

You can save what you learn

This is the part I’m most excited about ..

After an investigation where you figured something out .. a new pattern, a better approach, a playbook that worked .. just ask the AI to save it. “Save this for next time” or “remember this approach” or “add to knowledge base” .. something like that.

The AI writes the article for you. Proper format, proper tags, the lot. You just confirm.

You choose: save it locally (just for you / your team) or save it to the community (creates a GitHub issue so others can benefit too).

The AI never saves anything on its own. You’re always in control. That was very important to me when I designed this feature..

You don’t have to agree with everything

Want to see what’s actually loaded in the knowledge base?

Well, it’s simply here, online – but a more convenient way is to read it from VSCode. Open the Command Palette and run BCTB: Manage Knowledge Base.

It opens a screen that shows all loaded articles .. community and local .. with their titles, categories, tags, event IDs. You can filter, search, and just browse around. Have a look at what’s there .. might learn something

And from that same screen, you can exclude any community article you disagree with. One by one, or all of them .. whatever you’re comfortable with. Toggle it off, done. The status bar shows you what’s active.

It will add an exclude list in the config file (so you can do it yourself as well), like so:

If you think an article gives bad advice .. exclude it (would be cool you’d create an issue and explain why.. ).

It works everywhere

And this is important .. this isn’t a VS Code-only feature. Claude Desktop, Cursor, Copilot Chat .. whatever you’re using as your AI client .. the knowledge base is there. It loads at the server level, not the editor level.

The community part

Here’s what I’m really hoping for.

The community knowledge base lives in the GitHub repo under /knowledge-base/. Right now there are some seed articles in there .. things I’ve learned the hard way over the past years (not all – still have quite some to add..).

But the real value? That will come from you people.

If you’ve spent hours figuring out why a specific telemetry event fires the way it does .. that’s a KB article.
If you’ve built a KQL pattern that saved your customer a production outage .. that’s a KB article.
If you’ve seen a vendor extension cause a specific pattern in the logs .. yep, KB article.

The more we share, the smarter the tool gets. For everyone. And honestly .. isn’t that what open source is supposed to be about?