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Advisor

Conductor's Advisor functionality analyzes the Dapr installation on connected clusters and offers tailored insights and recommendations for optimizing Dapr from development to production. Advisor checks are performed periodically on a cluster-wide basis every 15 minutes, and any checks that fail are surfaced on the Advisor dashboard.

All Advisor recommendations are labeled with a severity of low, medium, or high, and grouped into the following categories:

  • Security - mTLS configuration, certificate expiration, component scoping, authentication
  • Reliability - High availability configuration, health checks, metric cardinality, control plane resource settings
  • Observability - Logging configuration, log levels, API logging settings, metrics collection, tracing setup
  • Performance (Enterprise-only) - Resource optimization, right-sizing, application resource recommendations, HA mode insights

When high-impact advisories are detected that impact a cluster or specific applications within a cluster, they appear in the Cluster summary view under High-Impact Advisories and cause the Insights indicator to become Issues Detected. See clusters and applications for more details.

High-impact advisory detection can also be surfaced via configuration of advisor rules as explained in notifications.

View Advisories​

Advisories can be found by navigating to the Advisor tab within a given cluster connection. The advisories are calculated on a 15-minute interval and displayed in the console grouped by category and severity. Use the Sync Advisories button to manually reconcile the state of advisories on the cluster outside of the rolling 15-minute window.

Advisor Dashboard

Selecting an advisory category provides the list of active recommendations based on the current state of the cluster and includes important information such as:

  • Recommendation details
  • Impacted resources
  • Resolution steps

Advisor Group

Fix Advisories​

Conductor supports "one-click" mitigations for some advisories. You'll find a button with the text Fix Advisory in advisories that support being automatically fixed. Using this feature, Conductor performs the appropriate configuration changes in your Dapr control plane to address the advisory recommendations.

Auto Fix

Dismiss Advisories​

Although Conductor's advisories are based on industry best practices, not all fit every use case. Conductor offers users the ability to dismiss unapplicable advisories via the Dismiss Advisory action.

Once an advisory is dismissed, it is moved to the Dismissed tab and removed from all other views. However, dismissals can be undone, triggering the associated recommendation to become visible again in the overview and respective category tabs.

Cluster Advisory Report​

The cluster advisory report aggregates all advisories generated for a single cluster by Conductor and summarizes them in a PDF document. This document is delivered to the email address associated with the user account that generated the report.

Advisory Report PDF

Send Cluster Advisory Report​

From the Clusters List or Cluster Details page, use the action menu on the right side and select Send Advisory Report.

Advisory Report

Advisories Reference​

Below is a list of all advisories currently available in Conductor.

Security​

  • Enterprise Autofix Dapr mTLS certificates close to or past expiration date
  • Enterprise Autofix Mutual Authentication (mTLS) is disabled
  • Enterprise Component metadata contains sensitive information as plain text
  • Enterprise Component version is deprecated
  • Enterprise Current Dapr version out of support policy
  • Dapr configuration access control policy not configured
  • PubSub component has no topic scopes defined
  • Component has no scopes defined
  • HTTPEndpoint has no scopes defined
  • Subscription has no scopes defined
  • Pod specification has automountServiceAccountToken set to true
  • Dapr to app token authentication not configured
  • App to Dapr token authentication not configured
  • Autofix Dapr control plane runAsNonRoot set to false
  • Bindings component has no direction defined
  • Component scoped to nonexistent app ID(s)
  • Secret store component is being used without scoping

Reliability​

  • Enterprise High cardinality Dapr gRPC client metrics detected
  • Enterprise High cardinality Dapr gRPC server metrics detected
  • Enterprise High cardinality Dapr HTTP server metrics detected
  • Enterprise High cardinality Dapr HTTP client metrics detected
  • High cardinality Dapr service invocation metrics detected
  • Enterprise Autofix Dapr control plane not deployed in highly available (HA) configuration
  • Autofix Dapr operator injector watchdog is disabled
  • Dapr app health checks are not configured
  • Dapr sidecar profiling server is enabled
  • Enterprise Dapr scheduler storage size is set to the default of 1Gi
  • Enterprise Dapr priority class name is not set to system-cluster-critical
  • Service Invocation maximum HTTP request header size is not configured
  • New Dapr version available

Observability​

  • Dapr sidecars not set to JSON-formatted logs
  • Sidecar API logging is enabled
  • Sidecar log level is debug
  • Autofix Dapr control plane is in debug mode
  • Autofix Dapr control plane not set to JSON-formatted logs
  • Autofix Dapr control plane log level is debug

Performance​

  • Enterprise Dapr sidecar resource requests and limits not set
  • Enterprise Dapr control plane resource requests and limits not set
  • Enterprise Application resource settings optimization advisories: Conductor provides resource optimization advisories for the top 10 most resource-intensive apps. Each advisory recommends new values for CPU and memory requests, as well as memory limits, for both app containers and Dapr sidecars. Conductor uses metrics data from up to the past 15 days to calculate the suggested resource settings
  • Dapr control plane deployed in HA mode with on-disk raft logs