AI Safety & Governance

Decisions on stale topology cause incidents,
so high-risk actions wait until the map is fresh

Topology Freshness is the safety primitive that stops agents from acting on a stale picture of the world. If the topology view (Container Graph, Service Map) is older than the freshness threshold, high-risk actions are blocked. The agent has to wait for the map to refresh, or fall back to suggest mode.

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app.novaaiops.com / topology-freshness
● LIVE
60s
Default freshness threshold
Per-source
configurable
Block
or warn, configurable
Logged
every blocked action
What's a Stale Map

Old data, old assumptions

Topology refreshes happen continuously, but cloud APIs rate-limit and ingestion has lag. A 4-minute-old container graph might miss a new pod that just started serving traffic. An agent that decides "rds-prod has no live consumers" might be wrong by 4 minutes worth of new pods. Freshness threshold is the line where we stop trusting the picture for high-risk decisions.

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    Per-source thresholds: container graph 60s, cloud inventory 5m, IAM 15m, different sources different cadences
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    Per-action sensitivity: destructive actions need fresher data than read-only investigations
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    Visible on the page: every source shows last-refresh time so you can see why a gate is closed
app.novaaiops.com / topology-freshness · sources
Action Gating

High-risk waits, low-risk continues

Not every action needs the freshest map. A SELECT query is fine on a 10-minute-old graph; a DROP TABLE is not. Each action class has a freshness requirement: read-only is loose, mutating is strict, destructive is strictest. Agents proposing strict actions on stale topology get blocked at the gate.

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    Per-class freshness: read-only loose, mutating strict, destructive strictest, three tiers
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    Block, not silently allow: blocked actions get a clear reason in the agent's response, not a hidden timeout
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    Fallback to suggest: when blocked, agents can write a runbook for a human instead of acting
app.novaaiops.com / topology-freshness · gate
Force Refresh

Operators can demand a fresh picture

During an incident, operators can force a refresh on any source. The page shows the refresh button per source with the last-refresh timestamp. Force refresh kicks the ingestion pipeline, returns once the source is fresh, and unblocks any pending agent actions in one go.

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    Per-source force button: one click to refresh; no full-platform refresh that costs more than it saves
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    Returns when fresh: the request is synchronous up to a 30s timeout, actions unblock the moment data lands
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    Rate-limited: cannot force refresh more than once per minute per source, protects upstream APIs
app.novaaiops.com / topology-freshness · refresh
Reporting

How often staleness blocks the fleet

The page reports weekly: blocked-action count per source, top services blocked, average wait time for refresh. A high block rate is a tuning signal, either thresholds are too strict, or an upstream API is too slow. Use the report to right-size your freshness policy.

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    Weekly block report: count by source and by service; tuning signal for thresholds
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    Wait-time histogram: distribution of how long actions wait when gated; long tails mean upstream API issues
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    Tuning suggestions: when a threshold blocks > 5% of actions, the page suggests loosening it 1 tier
app.novaaiops.com / topology-freshness · report
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Stale data, stale decisions

A small primitive that prevents a class of incidents nobody talks about: agents acting on the world as it was, not as it is.

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