Core benefits

Diagrid Conductor simplifies operating Dapr in production by automating operational tasks, reducing security risks and downtime, and accelerates development through enhanced visibility into the Dapr runtime. It integrates seamlessly with DevOps workflows, enforces best practices, and facilitates collaboration between teams. Conductor includes more than just tooling - the Conductor offering encompasses enterprise support options with access to Dapr CVE patching and feature development, as well as an enterprise distribution with features not present in Dapr open-source.

Conductor Enterprise package

The Conductor package includes several key benefits that help enterprises run mission critical workloads in production with confidence.

Production support & training

Diagrid provides 24/7 production support with a guaranteed one-hour response time for critical production issues, ensuring immediate patches and fixes when needed. Diagrid includes architectural reviews and training sessions, whether one-time or ongoing, that cover Dapr architecture, best practices, and hands-on workshops tailored to your teams. This comprehensive support and training package empowers your organization to de-risk Dapr adoption and accelerate your time-to-market. For more information about these components, see the Support Page.

Dapr fixes & CVE patches

To maintain production security, Diagrid offers fast patching of security vulnerabilities (CVEs) with a guaranteed service-level agreement based on the Common Vulnerability Scoring System (CVSS). Diagrid's dedicated Open Source Engineering team works to prioritize critical fixes and customer feature requests. This commitment ensures rapid issue resolution and keeps your systems secure and up to date.

Diagrid's Dapr distribution

Diagrid's enterprise Dapr distribution includes signed binaries with exclusive features not available in the open-source version. These features include namespaced installations for better resource isolation, minimized RBAC permissions, and integration with Dynatrace for advanced monitoring and observability. This distribution provides a secure foundation tailored to enterprise needs for large scale Kubernetes deployments.

Conductor SaaS

In addition to the benefits in the Conductor Enterprise package, the Conductor SaaS service provides tooling to reduce the operational burden of running Dapr in production, ensuring your Kubernetes clusters are configured optimally while allowing your teams to focus on more high-value tasks.

Operational excellence

Automate operational tasks

Keeping software up to date with the latest versions and promptly applying patches is essential for security and reliability. Conductor automates operational tasks such as Dapr upgrades and rollbacks, reducing the risk of human error and ensuring the system remains functional. With Conductor, new Dapr releases are available within 24 hours of their upstream release. For critical fixes, the Conductor Enterprise plan offers custom Dapr open-source patches, increasing responsiveness to security and uptime needs.

Schedule upgrades & canary releases

Conductor provides the flexibility to execute tasks like certificate rotations and Dapr upgrades either immediately or at scheduled times to reduce user impact. Its per-application rollout feature supports canary releases, allowing a subset of applications to be tested with a new Dapr sidecar. This allows changes to be deployed first to less critical environments and applications before broader deployment, reducing system-wide risk and ensuring system uptime.

Built-in best practices

Conductor's Advisor feature continuously checks Dapr environments for over 50 production best practices and potential misconfigurations. By highlighting any deviations, Conductor prevents misconfigurations, enhances security, and improves performance without manual checks. This continuous monitoring can be integrated directly into build pipelines, ensuring that your Dapr installations are always monitored for production best practices. Additionally, Advisor helps with resource usage optimization and savings on compute cost. By analyzing historical application usage, Conductor suggests optimized resource settings for sidecars and apps, leading to improved efficiency and cost reductions up to 80% in some cases.

Reduce security risks & downtime

Zero-downtime certificate rotations

Dapr secures applications by encrypting traffic with mTLS, which requires regular renewal of root certificates. Conductor automates mTLS certificate rotation across the control plane and all workloads. This ensures zero-downtime certificate rotation at your preferred frequency and time window, maintaining secure communication between applications with an up to date trust chain.

Critical alerts

Conductor includes built-in checks and dozens of alerts for misconfigurations and errors, promptly notifying you of unexpected events in your cluster. For example, Conductor performs component initialization checks to detect infrastructure misconfigurations immediately after deployment without the need to examine sidecar logs.

Conductor also provides comprehensive metrics and alerts for errors, performance degradations, and misconfigurations, offering a complete view of the entire Dapr environment. This proactive approach helps detect issues before they escalate, enabling rapid response times and minimizing downtime. Metrics can be exported to Grafana dashboards, or alerts can be sent via email or integrated with monitoring systems via webhooks, ensuring you are informed in the tooling of your choice.

Visualize golden metrics

Conductor's metrics graphs enable precise identification and resolution of issues during troubleshooting. By capturing over 150 Dapr metrics on o20+ visualization graphs, Conductor allows you to identify resource usage issues, network errors, and slow responses. These metrics can be exported and visualized in existing observability tools, facilitating rapid issue resolution by pinpointing problematic sources. Users have found that using Conductor reduces incident discovery time by up to 70%.

Develop & troubleshoot faster

Conductor accelerates development by providing deep insights into the Dapr runtime. It offers precise information on how your applications use Dapr, how they interact, and any specific issues that are occurring. This comprehensive view extends beyond basic Kubernetes data, giving you a clearer understanding of your applications' topology, performance, and health.

Dynamic application topology

Conductor's Apps Graph maps out your system topology using real-time metrics without the need for tracing integration. It shows you how applications are interconnected to each other through synchronous service invocations or asynchronous pub/sub interactions, and what infrastructure components these applications depend on. This visualization aids in collaboration between teams and offers real-time networking metrics. Get a system-wide view encompassing all applications or drill down into a single application and its direct dependencies bubbling up any issues.

Dapr runtime insights

Conductor provides unified visibility into the Dapr runtime, offering detailed insights that generic monitoring tools cannot match.

• Actors: Conductor offers a deep understanding of Dapr Actor behavior by displaying the number of active instances, actor types, and recent actor placement information. This level of detail helps you effectively optimize and troubleshoot actor-based applications.

• Resiliency policies: While Dapr's resiliency policies excel in detecting and recovering from transient failures, they can sometimes obscure underlying issues. Frequent retries or an often-open circuit breaker may indicate an overloaded system that goes unnoticed. Conductor provides visibility into resiliency policy configurations, the applications using them, and their usage rates. This insight helps you understand your system's health and behavior, enabling you to proactively address potential challenges.

• Pub/Sub subscriptions: Dapr supports three ways to subscribe to Pub/Sub topics: declarative (via YAML files), programmatic (via Dapr SDKs), and streaming (via streaming in Dapr SDKs). Conductor unifies visibility into all subscription types, allowing teams to monitor subscriptions without switching between tools or digging into source code. It lists all subscriptions in a single view and generates a unified YAML representation for quick assessment. For detailed information, Conductor provides networking metrics, including message delivery times, failure rates, and alerts for critical levels. This enables all team members to easily track which services are subscribed to which topics and how messages are routed across the system without needing to know the application intricacies.

Streamline Dapr resource creation

Dapr uses Kubernetes CRDs for its configurations, such as Component CRDs to abstract underlying infrastructure details and Resiliency CRDs to configure resiliency behavior such as retries, circuit breakers, and timeouts. However, configuring these CRDs can be complex. Each component has unique connection properties and authentication mechanisms, requiring developers to sift through reference documentation and manually figure out fields and allowed values. Conductor simplifies this process with guided resource builders.

• Component builder: A step-by-step interface for configuring Dapr components. It streamlines the setup by generating the necessary YAML files while handling connection configurations and access controls. Once applied, Conductor performs initialization checks, provides metrics, raises alerts, and ensures configurations adhere to best practices through its advisor.

• Resiliency policy builder: Simplifies the creation of resiliency policies by guiding you through configurations for policy types, timeouts, retries, and circuit breakers. This ensures your policies are effective, making applications more resilient and aligned with best practices.