Concepts
Concepts
How Sentinel works, and which features are ready for production use.
This section explains how Sentinel works. It has two parts.
Core describes the parts that every Sentinel installation uses. These parts are ready for production use. Read them in the order that the sidebar shows.
Experiments describes features that are not yet ready for production use. Each experiment page gives the status of the feature and tells you how to enable it. You can ignore this group. A Sentinel installation without any experiment is complete and supported.
The split follows the Sentinel organization, which marks each repository as core or experimental.
Maturity levels#
| Level | What it means |
|---|---|
| Ready | The feature is on by default. Tests cover it. You can depend on it. |
| Beta | The feature works and this site documents it. The configuration can change in a later release. |
| Alpha | You can evaluate the feature. The behaviour and the interface will change. Do not depend on it. |
Core features#
| Feature | Status | Page |
|---|---|---|
| Agent identity | Ready | Identity and trust |
| Access control and delegation | Ready | Identity and trust |
| Agent deployment and discovery | Ready | Control plane |
| Visibility of each model, tool and API call | Ready | Cortex |
| Traces and network data | Ready | Observability |
| Token counts, cost and latency on a laptop | Ready | Read the numbers |
Experimental features#
| Feature | Status | What it does | Page |
|---|---|---|---|
| MCP Gateway | Beta | Gives every agent one address for all tools. | MCP Gateway |
| Skills | Beta | Stores reusable instructions that an agent can use. | Skills |
| Agent context | Beta | Gives an agent durable storage for files and memory. | Agent context |
| Sandboxes | Alpha | Isolates an agent more strongly than a pod does. | Sandboxes |
| Intent-based access | Alpha | Denies an action that does not match the request of the user. | Intent-based access |
| Tool call validation | Alpha | Denies a tool call that has invented arguments. | Tool call validation |
| Context compaction | Alpha | Makes tool output smaller before the model reads it. | Context compaction |
| Cost control | Alpha | Removes unused tool definitions and limits spending. | Cost control |
Two more experiments exist in the platform but have no page on this site yet. Failure recovery returns a stopped agent to a known state. Data-flow analysis records the source of the data that an agent used. For the current state of both, see the cortex repository.
Report an error#
If a feature does not operate as this page describes, the error is in these documents. Open an issue on sentinel/sentinel, or write a message in Slack.