OpsAI is the Claude-based operations agent built into every Panelica panel, and its Telegram bridge lets your team message a group chat to have it carry out real server actions and reply with the results in Telegram's own formatting. You connect it with a bot token and a chat ID, no separate infrastructure required.
What OpsAI actually is
OpsAI is an operations agent embedded directly in the Panelica panel, built on Claude, with its own web desktop and terminal. It is not a chatbot layered over documentation — it operates the panel itself, carrying out the same kinds of multi-step tasks a sysadmin would: checking why a service failed, correlating logs, restarting the right process, adjusting a configuration and confirming the fix worked. It supports long-running tasks, staying on a single piece of work for up to 30 minutes without losing context, which matters for anything that involves waiting on a slow process, a deploy, or a multi-stage investigation.
Because it lives inside the panel, there is nothing separate to host, patch or keep online — it is part of the product you already run.
The web desktop and terminal
Inside the panel, OpsAI has its own workspace: a browser-based desktop and a terminal it can use to run real commands within the boundaries of the server it operates. You can watch it work in real time the same way you would watch over someone's shoulder at a terminal, which is useful the first few times you hand it something consequential and want to see exactly what it does before trusting it unattended.
Reaching it from Telegram
The same agent can be reached from a Telegram group instead of the panel's desktop. This turns operations work into something your team does from a chat app they already have open on their phone, rather than a console someone has to remember to log into.
Setting it up
- Create a Telegram bot through BotFather and copy its bot token.
- Add the bot to the Telegram group your team uses for server operations, and get that group's chat ID.
- In your Panelica panel, enter the bot token and chat ID in OpsAI's Telegram integration settings.
Once connected, messages in that group can drive OpsAI directly, and it replies in Telegram's own message formatting — not a raw dump of API responses.
What a Telegram-driven session looks like
Team member (in Telegram group): Disk usage alert just came in for the main server. Can you check what's eating space and clean up anything safe to remove?
OpsAI investigates using the same tools and API access it has inside the panel — checking disk usage by directory, identifying old log rotations and stale backup artifacts, and reporting back before removing anything irreversible.
OpsAI (reply in Telegram): Found 14GB in rotated nginx logs older than 90 days and 6GB in a completed backup job's temp directory. Both are safe to remove. Cleared both — disk usage is back to 61%. No other large consumers found.
The same pattern extends to restarting a stuck service, checking whether a certificate renewed, or investigating why a specific domain is returning errors — all without anyone opening the panel.
How this differs from the MCP server
OpsAI and the Panelica MCP server solve related but different problems. The MCP server is for connecting external AI clients — Claude Code, Codex CLI, and others — to your panel's API, so you can operate the server from tools you already use for development work. OpsAI is the panel's own embedded agent, reachable from its web desktop or from Telegram, with no external client or MCP configuration required at all. Between the two, most teams end up using the MCP server for development-adjacent work — deploys, application debugging — and OpsAI for operational monitoring and incident response, since the Telegram bridge puts it where alerts already land.
Where this fits with real incidents
The value of a Telegram-reachable agent is proportional to how fast your team needs to react. A disk-space warning, a failed backup, or a certificate that did not renew are all the kind of event that benefits from an immediate response rather than someone opening a laptop and logging into the panel. OpsAI turns that response into a message in the same group where the alert already showed up. Pairing OpsAI with the panel's event system, described in Announcing Webhooks, means the same disk-warning or backup-failure event that triggers a webhook can also be the trigger for a Telegram message asking OpsAI to investigate.
Get started
Connect OpsAI to your team's Telegram group. Open OpsAI's integration settings in your Panelica panel, add your bot token and chat ID, and start operating your server from chat. Explore the rest of the platform at panelica.com/features or see plans and pricing. Prefer an external MCP client instead? See Introducing the Panelica MCP Server.