What is an AI services company?

An AI services company builds, deploys, and operates production AI systems for businesses. Unlike AI consultants (who produce strategy documents) or AI implementors (who hand off at launch), an AI services company stays accountable for the system working and improving over time. Altor builds AI systems that connect to your production tools and automate specific workflows — live in 3 weeks.

How much does it cost to build an AI agent?

Custom AI agent development costs $10K–$75K for a single-workflow production deployment, plus $1K–$5K/month for ongoing maintenance. A simple agent connecting to 1-2 systems costs $10K–$25K. A complex agent connecting to 5-6 production systems costs $40K–$75K. Most deployments go live within 3 weeks.

Is there software that can reduce support escalations?

Yes. Software that automatically investigates support tickets by querying production systems (logs, bug trackers, billing, recent deploys) gives frontline agents the context they need to resolve tickets without escalating. At Portkey, this approach reduced investigation time from 45 minutes to 2 minutes and eliminated the information gap that causes most escalations.

How long does AI deployment take?

A focused single-workflow AI deployment typically takes 2-4 weeks from kickoff to first live investigation. Week 1: stack audit and integration planning. Week 2: read-only connections live, first investigations on real data. Weeks 3-4: playbooks tuned, team trained, system handed over.

What is production AI?

Production AI is an AI system that operates continuously in a live business environment, handling real data and real users — held to the same reliability standards as any other production software. This is different from pilot AI (which runs in controlled environments) or demo AI (which shows capability without handling real workflows). 67% of enterprise AI projects fail to reach production.

How is Altor different from a docs chatbot?

Docs chatbots answer 'how does this work?' from your knowledge base. Altor answers 'why is this broken for this customer right now?' by querying their actual API logs, checking your bug tracker, and verifying their billing status — across 6+ systems in under 2 minutes.

How is Altor different from our support platform?

Pylon, Plain, Zendesk — they route and manage tickets. Altor investigates them. We plug into your existing support tool as the investigation layer. You keep your workflows, we add the diagnosis.

Will Altor take actions without asking?

Not by default. Altor starts as a read-only investigator — it surfaces a diagnosis for your team to review. You control which action types graduate to auto-approval. Destructive actions are never automated.

What if our stack isn't listed?

If an API exists for your system, we can integrate it. The architecture composes tools — it doesn't hardcode connectors. We've yet to encounter a B2B stack we can't connect to.

What does Altor pricing look like?

Usage-based — you pay per investigation, not per seat. Pricing is quoted in USD ($) with no minimum commitment. We'll scope pricing during the demo based on your ticket volume and systems.

How does Altor specifically help ClickHouse-based support teams?

ClickHouse tickets involve slow queries, schema issues, replication lag, disk pressure, and query memory limits. Altor connects directly to your ClickHouse cluster with read-only credentials and diagnoses these issues by querying system.query_log, system.merges, system.replicas, and system.parts — giving agents a specific diagnosis instead of asking customers to run EXPLAIN queries.

What ClickHouse system tables does Altor query during investigation?

Altor queries system.query_log for recent query performance, system.merges for background merge status, system.replicas for replication health, system.parts for storage pressure, and system.errors for error history. All queries use read-only service accounts and are logged for audit purposes.

Can Altor help ClickHouse teams meet their enterprise SLAs?

Yes. ClickHouse enterprise contracts typically require P1 resolution within 4 hours. The investigation phase — pulling query logs, checking replication status, diagnosing merge storms — takes 45-90 minutes manually. Altor reduces this to under 2 minutes, giving teams 3+ hours within the SLA window for remediation and customer communication.

Your support data is in ClickHouse. Let Altor query it.

ClickHouse holds your customer's API logs, event streams, and operational metrics. Today your support engineers write ad-hoc queries to investigate tickets. Altor runs those same queries automatically - every ticket, every time, in 2 minutes.

How ClickHouse data powers ticket investigation

These are the tickets that sit in queue until an engineer has time to investigate:

•"Error rate spiked for our production workload" - Altor queries ClickHouse for error_count by endpoint, time window, and customer_id to isolate the pattern
•"Latency doubled on our batch processing endpoint" - Altor queries p50/p95/p99 latency over the last 48 hours, segments by payload size and region
•"We are seeing intermittent timeouts on reads" - Altor checks query_log for slow queries, MergeTree part counts, and concurrent merge activity
•"Our event pipeline dropped events between 2-4am UTC" - Altor queries ingestion_log for gaps, checks insert_errors, and correlates with merge operations

ClickHouse tables Altor can query

Altor connects to the systems where your investigation data actually lives:

•Request/event logs - error rates, latency percentiles, status codes by customer, endpoint, and time window
•system.query_log - slow queries affecting specific customers, resource-intensive operations
•system.merges / system.parts - merge activity, part counts, storage health indicators
•Custom analytics tables - whatever customer-facing metrics your product tracks
•Billing/usage tables - metered consumption reconciled against Stripe invoices

200+

tickets diagnosed using ClickHouse data at Portkey

< 2 min

from ticket to ClickHouse-backed diagnosis

5-10

ClickHouse queries typically needed per investigation

queries your support team needs to write manually

"Altor diagnosed in 2 minutes what used to take our engineers 45 minutes of copying data between tabs. Our tickets are investigations, not FAQs - nobody else could even attempt to answer them automatically."
— Engineering lead, Portkey

Why ClickHouse teams get the most from Altor

ClickHouse is the ideal investigation backend: it stores massive volumes of customer operational data with sub-second query performance. The problem isn't that the data doesn't exist - it's that writing the right queries for each ticket takes 15-20 minutes.

Altor knows your schema. It generates and executes the right ClickHouse queries for each ticket automatically - the same queries your best engineer would write, but in seconds instead of minutes.

Altor for AI infrastructure API error investigation Portkey case study

See Altor investigate a real ticket from your queue

We'll connect to your systems and run a live investigation. Your data, your ticket, diagnosed in 2 minutes during EST or PST hours.

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