Definition
An approval gate is a checkpoint in an automated workflow where a proposed action is held until a condition is met: a human approves it, a policy allows it, or a confidence threshold is reached. In incident remediation, gates decide which fixes software may apply on its own and which must wait for an engineer.
Explanation
Gates are what make automation possible to introduce. A gate can be evaluated by a person (human-in-the-loop: nothing runs until someone approves) or by a policy with a person watching and able to stop it (human-on-the-loop: the action runs unless someone intervenes, and every action is reported). The usual gate conditions are environment (production or staging), scope of change (one pod or a whole deployment), action type (restart or delete), confidence in the diagnosis, time window, and the track record of the same action on the same fault class. Gates are relaxed per fault class as evidence builds up, never globally.
How DataAgent approaches it
Gating is a named step in DataAgent’s flow: Detect, Enrich, Diagnose, Gate, Act, Learn. A fault class that has not yet earned autonomy through verified fixes goes to a person for approval. The guardrails are set together with the customer and cover production versus development, scope of change and confidence thresholds.
Example
Gate policy for a payments cluster: automated rollback is allowed in staging without approval. In production it requires approval until the same fault class has succeeded 20 times with no repeat incident, and it never runs between 09:00 and 11:00 on settlement days. Deleting a persistent volume always requires two approvers.
Related terms
- Levels of autonomy
- Guardrails
- Blast radius
- Audit trail for automated actions
- Auto-remediation
- Dry run
FAQ
- What is the difference between human-in-the-loop and human-on-the-loop?
- In-the-loop: the action waits for a person. On-the-loop: the action runs under policy and a person can see and stop it. Teams usually start in-the-loop per fault class and move on-the-loop as the record builds.
- Do approval gates slow down incident response?
- A gate adds the time it takes to get an approval. The answer is to make the proposal fast to evaluate: show the diagnosis, the evidence, the exact actions and the rollback.
- Who should be able to approve an automated fix?
- Someone who can read the proposed change and owns the affected service, with the approval recorded. Approval by the system that proposed the change is not a gate.