Guardrails

What this product area is for

Guardrails is the governance center for AI usage. It defines financial limits, approval workflows, policy behavior, exception handling, and auditability. It is where teams turn cost visibility into enforceable operating controls.

Who uses it

• Admins who manage governance rules.
• Finance users who own budget discipline.
• Platform teams who enforce runtime behavior.
• Security and compliance teams who need audit trails and controlled exceptions.

Core workflows

• Review budget status and adjust the daily budget.
• Create and operate spend caps across scopes.
• Assign budget owners with impact preview before saving.
• Configure policy sensitivity and alert policies.
• Review and decide approval requests.
• Manage reusable approval chains.
• Create, submit, duplicate, revoke, and audit exceptions.
• Verify audit integrity and export audit logs.

What Guardrails owns

• Budgets, caps, policies, approvals, approval chains, exceptions, and audit.
• Human-in-the-loop governance for sensitive decisions.
• Runtime controls that may block, require approval, or route exceptions.

What Guardrails does not own

• Detailed cost investigation, which belongs in Costs.
• Alert triage and incident response, which belong in Alerts.
• Optimization execution, which belongs in Optimizations.
• Slack or webhook connection setup, which belongs in Integrations.

Tabs in this area

• Overview — Review governance status across approvals, exceptions, caps, and audit integrity.
• Budget — Review global budget state and edit the daily budget only.
• Budget Owners — Assign budget owners by scope with impact preview before confirmation.
• Caps — Create and manage spend caps across supported scopes.
• Policies — Configure budget settings, anomaly sensitivity, alert policies, and simulations.
• Approvals — Review and decide governance approval requests.
• Approval Chains — Manage reusable approval workflow templates and preview resolved approvers.
• Exceptions — Create, submit, inspect, duplicate, and revoke temporary governance exceptions.
• Audit — Explore audit events, verify integrity, seal anchors, and export audit logs.

Recommended operating model

1. Start from the overview to identify the most important signal.
2. Open the tab that owns the workflow.
3. Use filters to narrow the scope before taking action.
4. Open detail drawers before changing sensitive configuration.
5. Use related links instead of duplicating workflows across product areas.
6. Confirm sensitive actions such as rotation, deletion, approval, payment changes, or revocation.
7. Preserve request IDs, trace IDs, run IDs, and audit IDs when escalating.

Product boundaries

Kadryn keeps each product area focused. Guardrails should provide enough context to understand the situation, but ownership of related workflows stays with the product area that is responsible for them.

For example, a page may show linked alerts, approvals, reports, integrations, or recommendations, but the full administration of those objects remains in their owning menu.

Related docs

Use the related links panel to continue into concepts, developer setup, troubleshooting, or security guidance.