History
Origin
HolmesGPT was created by Robusta.Dev, a company that sells a Kubernetes monitoring SaaS, with the GitHub repository opened on 2024-05-30 (GitHub createdAt). The README states the origin plainly: "Originally created by Robusta.Dev, with major contributions from Microsoft" (README, MAINTAINERS.md). The problem it targets is the one an on-call engineer faces at the moment an alert fires: gathering logs, metrics, and resource state from several tools and reasoning about what they add up to. HolmesGPT hands that gathering and reasoning to a language model driving read-only tools, so the investigation runs without a person paging through dashboards.
Microsoft is a co-maintainer, not just a user. MAINTAINERS.md lists ten maintainers from Robusta and one from Microsoft (Qingchuan Hao, mainred), and the CNCF introduction frames the project as Robusta-founded with Microsoft as a co-maintainer working on agentic troubleshooting for cloud native systems (CNCF blog, 2026-01-07).
Timeline
| Year | Milestone |
|---|---|
| 2024 | GitHub repository created by Robusta.Dev (2024-05-30) |
| 2025 | Accepted to CNCF at the Sandbox level (2025-10-08); application and onboarding tracked in cncf/sandbox #392 and #411 |
| 2026 | CNCF introduction blog (2026-01-07); documented here at 84cb39c, near release 0.35.0 (2026-07-01) |
How it evolved
Two shifts stand out. The first is the move into CNCF. The TOC accepted HolmesGPT as a Sandbox project on 2025-10-08, with the application and onboarding tracked in the cncf/sandbox repository (issues #392 and #411; CNCF project page). The CNCF introduction blog that followed positioned the project as agentic troubleshooting built for cloud native operations rather than a single-purpose Kubernetes analyzer (CNCF blog, 2026-01-07).
The second is the repository move. The project relocated from robusta-dev/holmesgpt to a dedicated HolmesGPT/holmesgpt org, which is the canonical location today: the git remote resolves to https://github.com/HolmesGPT/holmesgpt.git and the README header now reads "HolmesGPT, The CNCF SRE Agent" (README). The code moved with it; the home changed to a project-named org that fits its CNCF status.
Beyond governance and naming, the stated direction has widened from an interactive CLI toward an always-on "Operator Mode": the README's opening now leads with a mode that runs continuously, detects problems, posts to Slack, and can open a fix as a GitHub pull request (README). The core investigation loop is the same in either mode; what changes is when it runs and where its output goes.
Where it stands now
HolmesGPT is an active CNCF Sandbox project. Releases are tagged rather than driven by the pyproject.toml version field, which sits at 0.0.0; the latest release at the documented commit is 0.35.0 (2026-07-01), with a 0.36.0-alpha tagged the same day, so the pinned commit 84cb39c (2026-07-06) sits just after the 0.35.0 line. Governance is shared between Robusta and Microsoft through the maintainer set in MAINTAINERS.md. The project is built and tested with Poetry (poetry install, make test-without-llm runs pytest -m "not llm"), and it is licensed Apache-2.0 (LICENSE, repository metadata).