Site Reliability Guardian

A guardian is the grouping of objectives. It is built around a set of entities reflecting a service or application you want to safeguard.

A guardian provides you with a default automation workflow that performs the objective validation. As a result, a guardian always represents the latest validation result derived from the objectives.

We support two types of guardians. While these two types don't differ from a conceptual point of view, there are technical and semantic differences that distinguish them.

Lifecycle guardian (SDLC events)

Business guardian (Business events)

Objectives are means for measuring the performance, availability, capacity, and security of your services. Objectives are measured by indicators. You can define an objective for your guardian that is validated on demand or automatically.

An indicator is a value against which the warning and failure thresholds are checked using a comparison operator. To retrieve an indicator value, use DQL.

The static warning and failure thresholds determine whether the measured value of the indicator meets the objective, is close to violating the objective, or violates the objective.

Warning and failure are optional; objective validation can vary:

Auto-adaptive thresholds are dynamic limits that adjust over time based on previous validations. If an objective changes its behavior, the threshold adapts automatically.

The comparison operator defines whether the objective is met: the indicator is less than or equal to (A lower value is good for my result), or it is greater than or equal to (A higher value is good for my result), the warning and failure threshold.

To organize your guardians, you can assign tags to them. Tags use the key:value format, with the value being optional.

To assign a tag to your guardian, either specify it in the Add tags to your guardian section during guardian creation or add the tag later in edit mode.

To filter the list of all guardians by a tag, type the tag in the Search by name or tag field—the page automatically updates to show only guardians with matching tags.

This DQL shows you the first guardian.validation.objective business event with a specific guardian ID and parses the guardian tags field to extract a specific tag value from the event JSON.

fetch bizevents |
filter event.type == "guardian.validation.objective" AND guardian.id == "vu9U3hXa3q0AAAABADFhcHA6ZHluYXRyYWNlLnNpdGUucmVsaWFiaWxpdHkuZ3VhcmRpYW46Z3VhcmRpYW5zAAZ0ZW5hbnQABnRlbmFudAAkMWNiZDVkYWYtZThhNi0zMDkxLWFkOGQtMmU5NDNmNWJmZWJmvu9U3hXa3q0" |
limit 1 |
parse guardian.tags, "JSON:parsed_guardian_tags"

This DQL shows you all guardian.validation.finished business events from guardians tagged as tagkey:my-tagged-guardian.

fetch bizevents
| filter event.type == "guardian.validation.finished"
| expand guardian.tags
| filter contains(guardian.tags, "my-tagged-guardian")

You can automate the execution of a guardian via Workflows, tying guardian execution to an event or an API call.

Add a guardian action to an existing workflow or create a new workflow

The same final steps apply, whether you add a guardian to an existing workflow or create a new workflow.

Edit an existing workflow

Create a new workflow

Set up a guardian validation action

For more details, see also Validate a Site Reliability guardian, Automate release validation, Test pipeline observability

Create a workflow from the All guardians page

You can trigger your guardian automatically using a workflow.

To create a workflow for this guardian, follow these steps:

You can create a new workflow by selecting Automate. When you create a workflow this way, the following parameters are configured, but be sure to adapt them as needed.

The guardian validation action generates the following output and passes it to the subsequent actions of the workflow.

To learn more about workflows for a guardian, select > Get started with Automation.

If a workflow is created, your guardian can be validated automatically, depending on the trigger you chose. You can also perform the validation manually.

Validation overview

By default, the All guardians page lists all the guardians.

For more information on the All guardians page, see List and work with your guardians.

Automated validation

The event subscriptions in the workflow define when the validation of a guardian has triggered automatically.

Manual validation

You can perform a validation of a guardian by selecting the Validate button on the overview screen or within the validation details screen.

Individual objective result

For each objective, the validation returns the derived value and classification. The severity goes from the highest (1) to the lowest (5).

Overall validation result

After the validation of each objective is done, the guarding uses the most severe of individual validations as the overall validation result. Examples of this result usage include:

Leverage Segments in DQL-based objectives to logically structure and conveniently filter observability data.