Introducing Tanium Ask™: Using AI to Get Questions Answered

How many questions does your organization need to answer about your endpoints every day, and how long does it typically take to get the answer? How often do these questions require an operator with great expertise to provide accurate answers? Do the questions feel like they are resulting in fire drills for your teams?

If you’re an existing Tanium customer, you’re familiar with Tanium Interact, which has made answering ad hoc questions about your endpoints relatively easy for some of your more experienced operators. If you’re not, your IT and security teams are still living in a world where the constant stream of new or even reoccurring questions cannot easily be answered by products deployed. These products are generally pretty good at answering the top reoccurring questions with reports, but they are most likely unable to answer the long tail of less frequently asked questions that are just as important. Answering new and arbitrary questions is generally not possible without bringing in experts with developer-level skills to slice and dice data and create a report or dashboard to render the answers.

Even with products designed to help operators ask arbitrary questions, the bar to ask them is still pretty high. These products often require the questions to be asked in a technical syntax that rules out new operators or non-technical stakeholders from answering even the most simple questions. Many questions require scripts to be written, spreadsheets to be used, etc., and when the question of today needs to be modified even slightly, it’s back to the drawing board. With all of this friction, IT and security teams are spending way too much time trying to get the data they need to execute the organization’s strategic priorities.

With our prior tools, you’d ask a question and maybe get a complete answer in a week. And by complete,’ I mean only 90% or so.

Tanium Interact

With Tanium’s existing Interact question bar, users can submit questions using natural language, but, technically, Interact still requires computer language like syntax as input. Interact can coach users into using the correct syntax with real-time suggestions, but those suggestions are often ineffective as a question’s complexity increases. To address this challenge, Interact includes a Question Builder that provides a method of creating syntactically correct questions using a guided experience that includes form fields and filters. With these functionalities, Tanium provides an advanced data querying capability that is easy to use.

Tanium Ask

Tanium Ask takes Interact to an entirely new level. Tanium Ask is an artificial intelligence (AI)-powered enhancement that automatically translates any colloquially phrased question into Tanium’s Interact syntax to produce answers. It leverages the latest industry-leading large language models to convert human language into computer syntax accordingly. Now, you have a completely natural language experience when using Interact. Answering questions is accessible to your entire team and, if need be, even the CIO. No matter who inquires in colloquial or complex wording, Tanium Ask enables Interact to efficiently and effectively populate answers.

Here are some examples of questions asked using natural language that Tanium can easily answer:

• How many devices have high-severity vulnerabilities?
• What endpoints do I have that are missing critical patches?
• Are there any servers running into performance problems today?
• Which endpoints have unused Adobe Photoshop?
• What is the average time to patch my machines?

Figure 1: Tanium Ask screenshot

In addition to these simple queries, operators can also ask longer, more detailed questions. For example:

• Can you get me all the computers with less than 500MB disk space remaining and show me their names?
• How many Windows 10 machines do I have that can be updated to Windows 11?

With the enhanced Interact question bar using Tanium Ask, multiple users can submit natural language questions in their own way and in their own unique style. Answers come back instantly in real-time for your entire environment using Tanium, a single source of truth for your endpoint data.

Get advantages with the AI-powered question bar

With Tanium Interact now leveraging the power of AI through Tanium Ask, you can effortlessly answer complex questions regardless of your technical expertise. You’ll get answers back from a real-time data analysis across your entire environment from a centralized, single source of truth. With these insights, you can take the actions needed to improve the security posture and operational resiliency of your environment.

Learn more about Tanium Ask™ in this Tanium Community article or by watching this episode of Tanium Tech Talks.