Explore with Sample Data

Want to explore Steadybit without installing agents or extensions into your environment? You can use sample data to get a hands-on experience with Steadybit's features.

What is Sample Data?

Sample data is a pre-configured dataset that simulates a realistic Kubernetes-based microservice application. It allows you to:

• Explore a pre-configured service and explore Steadybit's service-centric view of your reliability work and risk calculation

• Review experiment designs and see how chaos experiments are structured

• Analyze past experiment runs and their results

• Explore targets and environments in the landscape

• Learn about reliability advice without deploying anything

All sample data is automatically assigned to a Sample environment in your Steadybit tenant.

Sample data is designed for exploration and learning. The experiments cannot be executed since they target simulated infrastructure. To run real chaos experiments, you'll need to install agents and extensions in your environment.

Sample Data Content

Service: Online Shop

The central piece of the sample data is a pre-configured service named Online Shop. The service allows a single view into your reliability work, bundling your service's targets, defines healthiness of your service, and all experiments validating different reliability scenarios.

The Online Shop service is configured with:

• Target Scope — Kubernetes resources of the services gateway, hot-deals, and toys-bestseller in the Sample environment, resolved via the query k8s.service.name IN ("gateway", "hot-deals", "toys-bestseller"). See targets below

• Validations — a periodic HTTP check that verifies the shop's endpoint returns 2xx while experiments run, defining what 'healthy' means for the Online Shop service

• Provided Experiments — ready-to-run provided experiments automatically generated from the linked service profile, covering Redundancy, Dependency, and Scalability categories

• Custom Experiments — linked custom experiments demonstrating advice-based and manually-designed reliability scenarios

• Advice — reliability recommendations surfaced for the targets within the service's scope

Based on this information, Steadybit calculates the associated reliability risk to help you prioritize and communicate your reliability work.

Provided Experiments

Provided experiments are automatically generated from the service profile and scoped to Online Shop's targets and validations:

Experiment	Category	Description
Pod Redundancy	Redundancy	Gradually reduces the redundancy of the service to verify it still provides its services
Unavailable Downstream Dependency	Dependency	Blocks a downstream dependency of the service's container to verify graceful degradation
Fill Container Memory Progressively	Scalability	Gradually fills the memory of the service's containers to verify graceful handling
Stress Container CPU Progressively	Scalability	Gradually stresses the CPU of the service's containers to verify graceful handling

Custom Experiments

Custom experiments are linked to the service to keep all relevant reliability work in one place. Most of these are generated from reliability advice, which automatically creates validation experiments based on your infrastructure configuration.

Experiment	Category	Related Advice / Template	Description
Gateway survives unavailability of third-party service	Dependency	Third-Party Service Is Unavailable for a Kubernetes Deployment	Tests whether the gateway deployment continues to function when a dependent service (toys-bestseller) becomes unavailable by blocking container network traffic
Zone Outage of eu-central-1a for gateway	Redundancy	Schedule Pods Across Zones	Simulates an availability zone outage to verify that traffic is properly routed to healthy pods in other zones and pods recover within 60 seconds
Zone Outage of eu-central-1a for toys-bestseller	Redundancy	Schedule Pods Across Zones	Same zone outage scenario targeting the toys-bestseller service to verify zone redundancy
Memory Overload of toys-bestseller	Scalability	Limit Memory Resources	Fills container memory to 80% capacity to verify the application handles memory pressure gracefully, including proper OOM handling and recovery
Unhealthiness of toys-bestseller is detected	Redundancy	Probes Configured	Verifies that Kubernetes detects unhealthy containers via health probes, restarts them, and routes traffic appropriately during recovery

Experiment Runs

The sample data includes a history of experiment runs showing:

• Completed runs: Experiments that passed all validations, demonstrating reliability (e.g. Zone Outage of eu-central-1a for toys-bestseller)

• Failed runs: Experiments that detected issues (e.g., "Check failure"), showing how Steadybit identifies reliability problems (e.g. Gateway survives unavailability of third-party service)

This allows you to understand what is going on in your system and analyze turbulent conditions.

Advice

Sample data includes advice definitions that help identify reliability improvements for your Kubernetes workloads. Each advice provides actionable guidance and can generate validation experiments:

Advice	Description
Limit Memory Resources	Identifies containers without memory limits configured, which could affect other pods on the same node
Probes Configured	Checks whether readiness and liveness probes are properly configured to enable Kubernetes health management
Schedule Pods Across Zones	Identifies workloads running in a single availability zone that could be affected by zone outages

Browse all available advice in the Steadybit Reliability Hub.

Targets

Underpinning the Online Shop service, the sample data includes a simulated Kubernetes environment representing an e-commerce "shop" application running on the shop-sample cluster in the shop namespace.

The targets include:

• Containers: Application containers running services like gateway and toys-bestseller

• Kubernetes Deployments: Workload definitions with pod specifications

• Kubernetes Pods: Running instances of the deployments

• Kubernetes Cluster: The overall cluster target

Each target comes with rich attributes including:

• Kubernetes labels (topology zones, service tiers, managed-by tags)

• Container metadata (image tags, engine versions)

• Host information (hostname, domain)

• Datadog and Steadybit-specific tags

Once you install an agent and the extension, they will automatically discover targets like these.

Working with Sample Data

When opening up Steadybit, you're welcomed by the dashboard showing you a summary of the most-important activities in your tenant.

Dashboard showing sample data

Reviewing Service and Service's Risk

You can explore the Online Shop service by jumping from the dashboard's service widget to the Online Shop service. Review its target scope, validations, and properties in the header bar and browse the Provided Experiments, Custom Experiments, and Advice tabs to understand how reliability work is bundled for this application.

Service Detail

Learn more about services.

Checking Experiment Designs

Check out the

• linked provided and custom experiment designs in the service Online Shop or

• navigate to Experiments in the Steadybit UI.

Open any experiment to explore its design, including:

• The hypothesis being tested

• The attack steps and their configuration

• Target selection using the query UI or query language

• Validation checks that determine success or failure

Overview of sample experiments

Sample experiment design

Viewing Experiment Runs

1. Open a sample experiment

2. Click on the Run tab

3. Review past runs, including:

   • Run status (completed/failed)

   • Timeline of each step

   • Logs and metrics captured during the run

Sample experiment run

Reviewing Advice

Review advice

• linked in the service Online Shop or

• navigate to Explorer and activate Show Advice in the landscape or

• go to the Advice-tab

• Review the reliability recommendations for sample workloads

Service showing sample advice for simulated Kubernetes environment

Explorer showing sample advice for simulated Kubernetes environment

Exploring Targets

Navigate via

• Services > Explore Services to the Explorer to drill-down your targets or

• check out the Explorer's Kubernetes Cluster view to browse the simulated Kubernetes resources and their attributes

Explorer showing a simulated Kubernetes environment

Integrating with Your Environment

Once you're ready to start chaos engineering with your own infrastructure, simply install the Steadybit agent and extensions in your environment.

The sample data targets will automatically be removed once you have real agents connected. Sample experiment designs and run history remain available and can be manually deleted when no longer needed