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 the Steadybit UI and understand its capabilities

• 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

Targets

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.

Experiment Designs

The sample data includes five pre-built experiment designs that demonstrate common chaos engineering scenarios. Most of these experiments are generated from reliability advice, which automatically creates validation experiments based on your infrastructure configuration.

Experiments from Advice

The following experiments were generated from advice provided by the Kubernetes extension: Advice-based experiments are suggested automatically and easy to create.

Experiment	Related Advice	Description
Zone Outage for gateway	Schedule Pods Across Zones	Simulates an availability zone outage (eu-central-1a) to verify that traffic is properly routed to healthy pods in other zones and that pods recover within 60 seconds
Zone Outage for toys-bestseller	Schedule Pods Across Zones	Same zone outage scenario targeting the toys-bestseller service to verify zone redundancy
Memory Overload of toys-bestseller	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	Probes Configured	Verifies that Kubernetes detects unhealthy containers via health probes, restarts them, and routes traffic appropriately during recovery

Custom Experiments

Sample data includes also custom created experiments to test specific resilience patterns:

Experiment	Experiment Template	Description
Gateway survives unavailability of third-party service	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 using a container network block traffic attack

Experiment Structure

Each experiment follows the Given-When-Then pattern:

• GIVEN: Preconditions are verified (e.g., all pods are ready)

• WHEN: The chaos attack is executed (e.g., network block traffic, memory fill)

• THEN: Expected behavior is validated (e.g., pods recover, HTTP requests succeed)

However, this structure is optional and you don't have to apply this to your experiments.

Experiment Runs

The sample data includes a history of experiment runs showing:

• Completed runs: Experiments that passed all validations, demonstrating successful resilience (e.g. Zone Outage 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)

Each run includes timestamps to correlate data with external systems like observability tools.. 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.

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

Exploring Targets

1. Navigate to Explorer > Targets

2. Filter by the Sample environment

3. Browse the simulated Kubernetes resources and their attributes

Explorer showing a simulated Kubernetes environment

Checking Experiment Designs

1. Navigate to Experiments in the Steadybit UI

2. Filter by the Sample environment or look for experiments tagged with sample

3. 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

1. Navigate to Explorer and activate Show Advice in the landscape or go to the Advice-tab

2. Filter by the Sample environment

3. Review the reliability recommendations for sample workloads

Sample advice for 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