> ## Documentation Index
> Fetch the complete documentation index at: https://docs.changeguard.ai/llms.txt
> Use this file to discover all available pages before exploring further.

# Product concepts

> The core ideas behind ChangeGuard — clearly labeled by maturity, so you always know what ships today.

This is the vocabulary the product, the docs, and the website all use. Each concept is labeled by maturity so there's never ambiguity about what's available to you today.

<Info>
  **How we label maturity.** **GA** = generally available. **Early Access** = real, but off by default and offered to design partners / on request. **Vision** = direction, not a feature you can turn on. We never describe an Early Access or Vision capability as if it ships today.
</Info>

## The idea

ChangeGuard is built on one observation: most production incidents trace back to a change. So instead of treating alerts as isolated events, ChangeGuard makes **change** the primary object — tracking it, correlating it to impact, and helping you decide what's safe to ship.

<Note>
  **Change Safety Control Plane** is our term for that long-term direction: one system for making safer production decisions before, during, and after change. It's a **Vision** that organizes the roadmap — not a single feature. Everything below labeled **GA** is what delivers on it today.
</Note>

## Generally available today

### Change Intelligence — **GA**

Continuous tracking of every deployment, config, and GitOps change across your fleet, with each failing workload correlated to the change that caused it — including the diff that shipped. This is the foundation the rest builds on.

### CSC Score (Change Safety Confidence) — **GA**

A deterministic, explainable 0–100 readiness score. Same inputs, same score — which is what lets you rely on it as a signal. Every point ties to a concrete factor you can inspect.

### Pre-flight check — **GA**

An on-demand "is it safe to ship right now?" verdict: **SHIP / HOLD / BLOCK**, with the score and reasons. It is **advisory** — a recommendation, never an enforced gate, unless you choose to wire it into your own pipeline.

### Incident investigation — **GA**

Detect a failing workload, explain the root cause with **cited evidence**, propose a fix, and describe how to verify it. Analysis you can check, not a black-box verdict.

### Current Understanding — **GA (where incident context is enabled)**

The maintained, change-centric read of an incident — what someone joining right now needs to know. Available where incident context is enabled for your tenant.

### Autonomy model — **GA**

Four levels — **Observe → Advise → Approve → Auto** — with **Advise** as the default. You decide how much ChangeGuard may do on its own. See [Autonomous Remediation](/autonomy/autonomy-model).

### Autonomous Remediation (Self-Healing) — **GA, opt-in**

Policy-governed detection → diagnosis → gated execution → **verification** → rollback. Off until you enable it and grant a narrow, namespaced RBAC Role. ChangeGuard never claims a fix succeeded it hasn't verified against real workload health, and on failed verification it performs exactly one audited rollback, then hands off to a human.

### Security scanning — **GA, plan-gated**

CIS benchmarks (KubeBench), CVEs (Grype), deprecated APIs (Pluto), SBOM (Syft), and runtime signals (Falco). Findings go to the control plane; your images and manifests don't.

### Compliance mapping — **GA, plan-gated**

Maps scan, RBAC, and SBOM evidence to framework controls (SOC 2, PCI, HIPAA, and others). This is **support for evidencing** controls — it helps you show your work. It is **not** a certification, and ChangeGuard does not certify you as compliant.

## Early Access

These are real and running, but **off by default** and offered to design partners or on request. Don't plan production dependencies on them yet.

| Capability                         | What it adds                                                                                               | Flag (default off)               |
| ---------------------------------- | ---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- | -------------------------------- |
| **Engineering Advisor**            | The advice a senior engineer would give before a change proceeds — surfaced only when it materially helps. | `AI_ENGINEERING_ADVISOR_ENABLED` |
| **Engineering Opinion**            | An owned, evidence-tied position on an incident: belief, confidence, tradeoff, and unknowns.               | `AI_OPINION_ENABLED`             |
| **Engineering Experience**         | Institutional memory — what similar past incidents did — woven in only when it changes the decision.       | `AI_MEMORY_ENABLED`              |
| **Reasoning / confidence factors** | Honest ✓ / ⚠ factors and "why not the obvious move" behind an opinion.                                     | `AI_REASON_ENABLED`              |
| **Multiplayer AI**                 | A shared incident workspace organized around one current understanding.                                    | `WORKSPACE_ENABLED`              |

<Warning>
  If you don't see one of these in your tenant, that's expected — they're not self-serve. Contact [support](mailto:support@changeguard.ai) if you'd like to join the Early Access program.
</Warning>

## Components

| Term                      | What it is                                                                                        |
| ------------------------- | ------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- |
| **Collector** (the agent) | The small, read-only in-cluster component that reads state and pushes it to the control plane.    |
| **Operator**              | The in-cluster controller that installs and manages the collector and scanners via a CRD.         |
| **Control plane**         | ChangeGuard's hosted side (`api.changeguard.ai`) where correlation, scoring, and analysis happen. |
| **Approval**              | A human authorizing an action before it runs, at the `Approve` / `Auto` boundaries.               |
| **Verification**          | Confirming a fix worked against real workload health before calling it done.                      |
| **Activity timeline**     | The append-only, per-incident audit record of what was observed and decided.                      |

## A note on honesty

If a capability isn't listed as **GA** above, treat it as not-yet-generally-available and check with your ChangeGuard contact before depending on it. The [website](https://changeguard.ai) uses these exact same labels — so what you evaluate is what you can turn on.