Release Roundup August 2024

Over the past year, the Gremlin team has focused on giving you more tools to adapt Gremlin to your organization’s reliability needs. We started with customizable reliability tests, and now, we’ve released customizable role-based access controls (RBAC). We’ve also made it easier to target specific availability zones when running Failure Flags experiments, and to run experiments behind a proxy.

Keep reading to learn more!

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New features

Create custom roles to meet your organization’s requirements

Gremlin now supports fully customizable role-based access controls (RBAC). RBAC lets you specify which actions your users can perform. You can assign users to one or more roles, with each role enabling a different set of privileges. Privileges correspond to actions in Gremlin, such as running a CPU experiment or managing user accounts. Gremlin also provides a set of standard roles out-of-the-box.

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In addition to controlling which privileges users have, you can set default privileges for new team members. When new users join a Gremlin team, Gremlin automatically assigns them a default role. For example, you can create a role with minimal privileges and make it the default, then assign more permissive roles to individual users as needed.

Read our blog to learn how customizable RBAC works in Gremlin, or check out the documentation for instructions on setting it up.

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Agent improvements

We’ve made several improvements to our Linux, Windows, Failure Flags, and private network integration (PNI) agents.

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Per-team Private Network Integrations

Gremlin’s Integration agent lets you connect Gremlin to services hosted on your private network without having to expose them to the public Internet. Now, you can now scope Integration agents to individual teams instead of your entire company. This lets teams use private network integrations (PNI) across multiple networks, even if those networks are isolated from each other.

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Improved dependency detection

Gremlin will more accurately detect your service’s dependencies. In addition to using the service’s DNS records, the Gremlin agent will detect whether the service has an active connection to the dependency. This will improve the relevance of dependencies that Gremlin shows in your service’s dependency list.

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Click here to learn how to manage your service’s dependencies in Gremlin.

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Easier Failure Flags experiment creation

We’ve made the Failure Flags experiment creation interface easier! Now you can select your Failure Flag, attributes, services, and effects using drop-down boxes. We still allow JSON entry as an option via the JSON tab. Gremlin will automatically update your JSON to match the contents of the drop-downs, and vice versa.

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Improved disk experiment compatibility

When running a disk experiment, the Gremlin agent will no longer mark newly created files as “hidden.” This allows other applications, like monitoring services and observability tools, to correctly detect and measure changes in disk usage.

Click here to learn more about the disk experiment.

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Try it for yourself

If you already have a Gremlin account, all of the features highlighted in this blog are already available to you. To make use of the updated agent features, deploy version 2.52.0 or later of the Linux or Windows agents, version 0.8.0 or higher of the Chao agent, or version 1.0.1 or higher of the Failure Flags sidecar.

New to Gremlin? Sign up for a free 30-day trial to see how Gremlin helps you uncover reliability risks and improve your reliability posture.