Skills and Commands

The Skill Catalog is where your organization publishes reusable intelligence assets for Riverbed IQ Ops. Catalog entries are either skills or commands. Understanding the difference helps you build a catalog that Chat, Agents, and operators can rely on.

For catalog navigation and filters, see Skill Catalog. For authoring procedures, see Creating and Editing Skills.

Skills

A skill describes capability the platform can discover and apply dynamically during an assistant session, for example, monitoring guidance, troubleshooting playbooks, or domain-specific instructions written in Markdown. Skills are suited to knowledge you want Riverbed Q (Q) to draw on without requiring the user to type a slash command every time.

Commands

A command is invoked explicitly. Users pick commands from the Commands slash palette in Chat. Commands can also support agents that you run from on-demand runbooks, including runbooks you place on a schedule. You schedule the runbook that contains an Agentic AI node, not the agent catalog entry itself. See Agents and Runbook Scheduling page.

Lifecycle and governance

New catalog entries start in Draft. Publish when they are ready for operators and automations to use. You can filter the catalog by type, state, owner, category, and mode, and use counters for totals, skills, commands, and published items.

Metadata such as IMPACT, TRUST, and MODE helps teams classify how an entry should be used. Align these fields with your change-management practices before publishing broadly.

Why a catalog matters

  • One source of truth for instructions instead of ad hoc prompts in tickets or chat threads.

  • Consistent behavior between Chat, embedded assistant surfaces, and runbook agents.

  • A path to scale automation as your team adds skills and promotes proven commands.

AI-Generation disclaimer

When using Generative AI technologies to create and generate content, the target audience must be aware that the content is AI generated. We recommend adding a disclaimer to the output of the content generated using the GenAI node. For example, appending "AI-Generated content".