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Reliability Delta

The Reliability Delta capability allows you to compare two snapshots of your environment to determine whether reliability has improved, regressed, or meaningfully changed. This is especially powerful when evaluating release candidates, validating load test results, or confirming the stability of ongoing changes in production.

A snapshot captures the state and behavior of your system—including its services, dependencies, and underlying infrastructure—over a defined time window (up to two continuous hours). By comparing any two snapshots, Causely surfaces changes in reliability, service behavior, root causes, and resource utilization, enabling you to definitively assess whether a new version or configuration is safer, riskier, or equivalent.

When to Use Reliability Delta​

Release validation​

Compare a release candidate against a stable version to detect regressions in latency, error rate, throughput, or resource usage before deployment.

Load testing and performance analysis​

Capture snapshots during load tests and compare them to production baselines to identify bottlenecks, capacity issues, or emerging root causes.

Continuous environment drift detection​

Review snapshots taken at different points in time to understand whether reliability is trending up or down, even outside of formal releases.

How Snapshots Work​

A snapshot records:

  • Service behavior (latency, request rate, error rate, throughput)
  • Dependency and service counts
  • Detected root causes (urgent and non-urgent)
  • Infrastructure behavior and resource usage (CPU, memory, network I/O)
  • Version, schema, and metadata you provide
  • Duration and time window of captured activity

Snapshots can be created in two ways:

  1. Last 2 hours: automatically captures data from the most recent 120 minutes
  2. Custom time window: select a start date and time for a snapshot (up to 2 hours). The start time must be within the last 6 hours.

Snapshots appear in the Snapshots panel and can be selected for comparison in the Comparisons panel.

Comparing Snapshots​

The Comparisons view enables you to evaluate changes across two snapshots.
You can also apply an optional scope to focus the comparison on a specific set of services or infrastructure.

  • Baseline Snapshot: the version or time period you trust
  • Candidate Snapshot: the release, change, or window you want to evaluate

Causely computes the reliability delta across:

Root Causes​

  • New root causes introduced in the candidate window
  • Cleared root causes no longer present
  • Classification by urgent vs. non-urgent

Service Behavior​

For each metric, Causely shows:

  • Before value
  • After value
  • Absolute change
  • Percent change

Metrics include:

  • Service count
  • Total requests
  • Request rate
  • Average request duration
  • Average error rate

Resource Utilization​

  • Entity counts
  • CPU utilization (avg & max)
  • Memory utilization (avg & max)
  • Network throughput (receive & transmit)

Interpreting Results​

🟢 Proceed with release​

No concerning changes detected.

The comparison shows the candidate snapshot introduces no new urgent root causes, indicating the version is safe to proceed with.

Healthy Snapshot

🔴 Test snapshot rejected​

New urgent root causes detected that require investigation before deploying.

This indicates the candidate snapshot introduced one or more urgent root causes, which may reflect:

  • Newly degraded or failing services
  • Significant regressions in error rate, latency, or throughput
  • Resource or dependency behavior signaling instability
Rejected Snapshot

UI Walkthrough​

Reliability Delta Overview

Snapshots Panel​

View and manage stored snapshots. Selecting a snapshot displays its metadata, duration, and captured behavior.

Comparisons Panel​

Choose any two snapshots to view detailed reliability deltas across root causes, services, and resources.

Snapshot Creation Dialog​

  • Add a name, version, and description
  • Choose last 2 hours or a custom time window
  • Click Create to capture the snapshot
Create Snapshot

Comparison View​

Displays:

  • Snapshot Summary: time window, metadata, version info
  • Root Cause Summary: new vs. cleared causes
  • Service Summary: metric-level comparisons
  • Resource Summary: infrastructure-level deltas

Example Workflows​

Validating a release candidate​

  1. Capture a snapshot of the last stable version
  2. Deploy the release candidate
  3. Capture a new snapshot
  4. Compare the two snapshots
  5. Validate that no new urgent root causes or degradations are introduced

Load test regression analysis​

  1. Create a snapshot of baseline load test for a stable version
  2. Run the load test on a new version and capture a snapshot during it
  3. Compare the snapshots to identify scalability issues or bottlenecks

Reliability drift detection​

  1. Periodically capture snapshots (daily/weekly)
  2. Compare snapshots to detect slow degradation or improvements
  3. Use deltas to preemptively address emerging risks

Why Reliability Delta Matters​

Engineers must ship quickly without compromising reliability. Reliability Delta provides a deterministic, data-driven method for evaluating the impact of change.

It delivers:

  • A clear comparison of behavioral changes between versions
  • Root-cause-aware analysis powered by Causely’s causal model
  • A consistent framework for release evaluation and change management
  • Execution confidence even under rapid change and high-visibility releases

It transforms subjective judgment into objective reliability signals.