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Rancher Oracle is a hosted RAG (Retrieval-Augmented Generation) service purpose-built for Kubernetes troubleshooting. It is the AI backend that powers Pastures AI’s grounded diagnostics.

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How Oracle works

1

User asks a question

A query is submitted through the Pastures AI drawer (e.g., “Why is my etcd cluster degraded?”).
2

Semantic search

Oracle embeds the query and performs semantic search across a corpus of 48,000+ real issue resolutions from 13 open-source repositories.
3

Context retrieval

The top-k matching issues, pull requests, and discussions are retrieved from the vector database.
4

Grounded generation

The retrieved context is passed to the LLM, which generates a response grounded in real resolutions — not generic knowledge.
5

Response with citations

The response is returned with source citations linking to the actual GitHub issues that informed the answer.

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Key differentiators

Source citations

Every response cites actual GitHub issues — not hallucinated references. Users can click through to verify the source.

Fleet correlation

Oracle detects when the same issue is active across multiple clusters, surfacing fleet-wide patterns automatically.

Confidence scoring

Each response includes a confidence score reflecting how well the query matches known resolutions in the corpus.

Fix verification

After a fix is applied, Oracle can monitor the cluster and verify the issue is resolved.

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What Oracle is not

  • Oracle is not the extension. The Pastures extension is fully open source (Apache 2.0) and works without Oracle by connecting to any OpenAI-compatible model.
  • Oracle is not a general-purpose LLM. It is specifically tuned for Kubernetes and Rancher ecosystem troubleshooting.
  • Oracle is not required. You can use Pastures in demo mode or with your own model. Oracle is the optional paid service that adds grounded responses, citations, and fleet intelligence.

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Architecture

┌─────────────────┐     POST /api/diagnose     ┌──────────────────┐
│  Pastures AI     │ ──────────────────────────► │  Pastures Engine │
│  (Rancher ext)   │ ◄────────────────────────── │  (Oracle)        │
└─────────────────┘     diagnosis + citations    └──────┬───────────┘
                                                        │
                                                 ┌──────▼───────────┐
                                                 │  Vector DB        │
                                                 │  48K+ resolutions │
                                                 └──────────────────┘
The extension sends queries to the Engine via POST /api/diagnose. The Engine performs RAG against the corpus and returns a structured diagnosis with source citations. See the API Reference for full endpoint documentation.