Model Rocket’s AWS Ops Breakthrough with AI SRE Agent

Model Rocket, an innovative custom technology solutions provider, powers everything from influencer blogging platforms to global e-commerce systems. Their engineering team was spending hours troubleshooting ITOps issues, taking valuable time away from client-facing innovation. By bringing in an AI SRE, they transformed operations and dramatically improved their service reliability. This enabled their lean team to focus on what they do best: creating cutting-edge solutions that make advanced technology accessible to businesses of all sizes.

The Challenge: Complex Cloud Operations with a Lean Team

As Model Rocket’s cloud-native infrastructure expanded to serve more businesses, their team faced a critical challenge in modern CloudOps. Their platform was successfully serving businesses across various industries, but this success came with mounting operational complexities:

• Hours spent diagnosing issues: Engineers were spending hours or even days diagnosing and troubleshooting incidents across multiple AWS services, pulling them away from critical development work
• Growing IT stack complexity: Their cloud-native environment—spanning Amazon RDS, Amazon SQS, ElastiCache, Lambda, and more—made maintaining rapid response times increasingly difficult
• Innovation bottlenecks: Strategic initiatives like migrating from ECS to Amazon EKS were repeatedly delayed as limited engineering resources were consumed by operational issues

While their existing CloudWatch setup was generating valuable data, the team simply couldn’t analyze it fast enough to prevent service impacts. They needed a solution that could scale their operational capabilities without expanding headcount or compromising their rapid development pace.

Real-World Impact: Solving Critical Performance Bottlenecks

A recent incident perfectly illustrates Hawkeye’s value in action. Model Rocket encountered a challenging performance issue that threatened to impact their service level agreements. Here’s how Hawkeye transformed their troubleshooting process:

The Situation

Model Rocket’s team was conducting load tests when they noticed several critical APIs were performing significantly slower than expected. This performance degradation would have risked their ability to deliver on promised service levels if it had gone undetected before deployment.

Hawkeye’s Expert Analysis

When consulted about the performance issues, Hawkeye immediately diagnosed the root cause that had eluded the engineering team: their Lambda functions were creating an excessive number of database connections. This precise diagnosis—which might have required extensive manual investigation—was delivered almost instantly.

Swift Resolution

With Hawkeye’s insights, the team implemented targeted configuration changes:

• Modified the connection pool parameters for their Lambda functions
• Adjusted database connection lifetimes to optimize resource usage
• Immediately observed significant performance improvements across their affected services

“Our load testing revealed API performance issues that would have affected service quality,” said Jon Thies, Co-founder and CTO of Model Rocket. “Hawkeye performed root cause analysis instantly and recommended a solution that saved our engineers countless troubleshooting hours. This allowed us to improve our service performance and strengthen our SLA commitments to customers before deployment.”

Enhanced Service Quality

This rapid diagnosis and resolution enabled Model Rocket to:

• Exceed their promised service level agreements even during peak traffic periods
• Deliver consistently responsive experiences across all customer touchpoints
• Prevent potential service degradation before it impacted end users
• Build stronger trust with clients through unwavering platform reliability

Better Customer Experience, Plus Reclaimed Engineering Time

The implementation of Hawkeye by NeuBird marked a fundamental shift in Model Rocket’s operations. The AI SRE Agent seamlessly integrated with their AWS environment, immediately beginning to analyze their infrastructure telemetry in real-time.

The impact was immediate and dramatic:

• 92% MTTR Reduction: Issues that once took days to diagnose were now resolved in minutes, with Hawkeye automatically correlating data across their entire AWS stack
• 24/7 Expert Monitoring: The platform provided continuous, expert-level analysis across their complex cloud-native environment, eliminating the need for engineers to context-switch between development and operations
• Enhanced Development Focus: With Hawkeye handling routine incident investigation and response, the engineering team could focus on strategic initiatives like their EKS migration

“The complexity of modern cloud-native environments demands a new approach to IT operations, and Hawkeye delivers exactly that,” said Jon Thies, Co-founder and CTO of Model Rocket. “Having an AI SRE working alongside our team 24/7 has transformed how we operate. Critical issues that once took days to resolve are now resolved in minutes. This has dramatically improved our team’s efficiency and enabled us to consistently exceed our service level objectives.”

Transforming Cloud Operations with Agentic AI

What sets Hawkeye apart from traditional monitoring tools? It’s not just about alerting or data collection—it’s about bringing instant expertise and actionable intelligence to every incident. For Model Rocket, the transformation included:

• Automated root cause analysis across their entire AWS ecosystem
• Enhanced incident management without expanding their team
• Consistent service reliability even during rapid development cycles
• More time for engineers to focus on innovation—no more context-switching between development and operations

Results That Matter

For Model Rocket, Hawkeye has proven to be more than just another tool—it’s a trusted teammate that brings instant expertise to every incident, enabling the team to maintain reliability while scaling operations efficiently. As cloud-native operations continue to grow in complexity, the ability to leverage Agentic AI for intelligent, automated incident response isn’t just a luxury—it’s a necessity for maintaining competitive advantage.

Ready to transform your cloud operations? Learn more about how Hawkeye can help your team master complex infrastructure challenges and deliver consistent service reliability, no matter the scale.

Want to learn more about how Hawkeye can transform your IT operations? Book a demo today.