Frequently asked questions.

Hermetiq helps Bazel teams investigate slow builds, failures, cache misses, and infrastructure problems—and turn those findings into improvements they can review and verify. Connect observability and Barn Owl to the Buildbarn you already run, or use Hermetiq’s managed remote cache and execution service.

Barn Owl is Hermetiq’s AI build engineer inside your Bazel + Buildbarn stack — it watches your cache, remote execution, and worker fleet in real time, tells you what to fix, and earns the trust to fix it for you.

Barn Owl is Hermetiq’s AI build engineer, tuned to understand Buildbarn configuration and telemetry alongside Bazel build events, profiles, and action data. It uses that context to investigate problems, explain regressions, and recommend changes that help teams run their build infrastructure efficiently. Barn Owl is not open source.

Barn Owl helps you:

• Find and fix build bottlenecks—even with remote execution
• Pinpoint what changed when builds get slower
• Understand cache misses and stop rebuilding the same work
• Find out why builds are queueing and workers are idle
• Diagnose intermittent remote build failures
• Improve your Buildbarn configuration with reviewable changes
• Identify wasted infrastructure capacity and reduce build costs

Keep your Buildbarn and connect Hermetiq for observability and AI-assisted investigation. Relate a slow or failed build to action timing, cache behavior, queue pressure, worker capacity, and storage signals. Barn Owl helps investigate across those layers using the data you connect.

Yes. Hermetiq Cloud provides managed Buildbarn remote cache and execution, with observability and Barn Owl. You can use the stack without taking on its infrastructure operations yourself. Customer-hosted deployments are also supported; hosting location and operating responsibilities are agreed as part of the deployment.

Bring us one slow build, unexplained cache miss, or recurring failure. Try Hermetiq Cloud, or connect your existing Buildbarn and the telemetry needed to investigate that problem. Evaluate the results on a representative workload; contact us for pricing and deployment scope.

Bazel and Buildbarn teams spending too much time investigating build problems or operating build infrastructure. Keep operational control with better investigation tools, or hand off the agreed infrastructure operations to Hermetiq.

Bazel still builds and tests your code, and your CI still coordinates your pipeline. Hermetiq adds observability and Barn Owl to your existing Buildbarn, or provides Buildbarn as a managed service.

The charts package the configuration and Kubernetes resources needed to deploy Buildbarn, with opinionated defaults, checks during Helm rendering, and examples for storage, identity, worker pools, and observability. We built them to share the answers we needed while operating Buildbarn ourselves. They help you get started; running the deployment remains your responsibility. Choose managed Buildbarn if you want Hermetiq to handle the infrastructure operations. Get the charts: Hermetiq/hermetiq-k8s on GitHub.

Grafana and logs remain useful for monitoring and investigation. Hermetiq relates available infrastructure signals to Bazel invocations, targets, actions, and build history, giving engineers and agents build-specific context for their investigation.

A coding agent can inspect code and run commands. Hermetiq’s MCP integration gives it structured build history and connected cache, execution, and infrastructure evidence beyond the current workspace. Barn Owl specializes in using Buildbarn and Bazel context to investigate the build system.

You can connect the Buildbarn you already operate. Initial integration configures build-event reporting and the additional telemetry you want to use; changes to build rules or infrastructure may follow when an investigation identifies a specific improvement.

Start with Bazel’s Build Event Protocol (BEP) for invocation, target, test, and outcome data. Add JSON profiles for critical-path analysis, cache records for cache investigation, and completed-action and infrastructure telemetry for remote-execution diagnosis. Each view depends on the corresponding data being connected.

Yes. Hermetiq’s MCP integration supports clients including Claude Code, Claude Desktop, Cursor, Windsurf, and Codex. Available queries depend on your project’s telemetry, permissions, and server configuration; repository edits and terminal commands use the separate access you grant your coding client.

Hermetiq focuses on operating and improving Buildbarn, with Barn Owl connecting Buildbarn configuration and telemetry to Bazel build data. You can use it with the Buildbarn you already operate or choose managed Buildbarn. Compare providers using a real workload: the quality of the diagnosis, the deployment options, and who takes responsibility for operations.

With the relevant profiles and remote-action telemetry, Hermetiq helps separate analysis, queueing, input transfer, execution, and output transfer, then compare equivalent builds. That helps you locate a regression and inspect the evidence before making changes.

With the relevant cache and action records connected, Hermetiq can compare inputs, commands, environments, and execution platforms across invocations. That helps distinguish expected invalidation from avoidable differences; an aggregate hit rate alone does not explain a miss.

Yes, when the relevant telemetry and cost inputs are configured. Hermetiq connects build demand to queues, workers, storage, and resource use so you can investigate bottlenecks, wasted work, and capacity decisions.

Our published customer case study describes a frontier AI lab using Hermetiq for observability across more than two million builds per day on Buildbarn it operates itself. Our build-failure and queue-optimization walkthroughs are controlled local examples using Codex and Hermetiq MCP. They demonstrate specific diagnostic and repair workflows, not production benchmarks or guaranteed speedups.

That depends on what is limiting them. We recommend evaluating a representative workload, identifying a specific bottleneck, and comparing equivalent runs before and after a change. Useful measures include elapsed time, queue delay, expensive cache misses, infrastructure use, and investigation time.

Yes. Hermetiq supports cloud and customer-managed deployments for both managed builds and intelligence for existing Buildbarn. Hosting location and operating responsibility are separate choices, so we agree both as part of the deployment scope.

Build observability starts with telemetry, but build data can contain commands, file paths, logs, and outputs. Remote execution also processes the inputs required by each action, and an agent proposing code changes needs appropriate repository access. The data and access required depend on the workflow you enable.

Self-hosting Hermetiq does not by itself keep an external coding agent’s inference on-prem. MCP results enter the connected client’s context, and subsequent processing follows that client and model provider’s configuration. Review both the Hermetiq deployment and the AI client’s data path.

For hosted deployments, our Terms of Service permit use of customer data Hermetiq receives to improve the service, including AI-model training. Our Privacy Policy also permits indefinite retention and use of anonymized, aggregated service-usage data. For customer-hosted deployments, our Software License Agreement grants no right to use customer data for training. Your applicable agreement and any connected AI provider’s policies govern; these permissions do not establish that your data is currently being used for training.

Production changes remain subject to the permissions and review workflow you configure. Unattended monitoring and automatic fix PRs are coming soon; automatically applying and validating production changes is a separate roadmap step. Today, connected coding clients make authorized changes using their own repository and terminal access.

You can start the conversation before adopting Bazel. For managed builds, we assess your codebase, toolchains, dependencies, and migration effort; the agreed workload needs a supported Bazel build before Hermetiq can operate it.

Contact us for pricing based on your workload and deployment scope. Integration effort depends on your infrastructure and the telemetry needed for your evaluation.