Announcement

Prioritize governance with control muting

Suppress alerts while maintaining your security posture.

Turbot Team
5 min. read - Jan 29, 2025
Suppress alerts while maintaining your security posture.

Control muting in Guardrails is a powerful new feature that enables cloud teams to focus on priorities by selectively suppressing controls based on context without compromising their security posture.

What is control muting?

Control muting allows cloud teams to temporarily or indefinitely suppress specific controls while retaining their underlying security policies.

Teams can mute controls via the Guardrails console or API using annotations. Muting can be applied for a set duration (e.g. 1 day, 1 month, or custom periods) or based on control state (e.g. until the control status changes from ERROR to OK).

When to use control muting

Control muting helps streamline operations without compromising security policies. It’s a lightweight alternative to adjusting policy settings or creating exceptions, and it’s particularly useful in these scenarios:

Planned changes and maintenance

During scheduled maintenance or infrastructure updates, muting specific controls reduces unnecessary alerts while preserving visibility into other issues. For example, muting high availability controls during a planned 4-hour failover test, or replication controls during a 2-week regional migration.

Known issues under resolution

When actively addressing an issue, mute controls to focus efforts:

  • Suppress alerts until a fix is deployed (e.g., mute until the control status changes to OK).
  • Temporarily silence noisy controls while fixing errors (e.g., mute ERROR states).
  • Mute controls for a specific timeframe during fix deployment (e.g., mute for X days).
  • Reduce noise from multiple related controls, focusing on the key issue.

False Positive Management

While tuning detection logic, mute controls generating known false positives. This allows teams to adjust underlying rules without being overwhelmed by irrelevant alerts.

Muting vs. Exceptions:

Both muting and policy exceptions help manage governance controls, but they serve distinct purposes. The primary difference lies in when they are applied:

Control Muting: Suppresses alerts after the control has already evaluated its state. Muting is an operational action that doesn’t affect how the control state is determined.

Policy Exceptions: Modify governance requirements and directly influence how the control state is evaluated. Exceptions adjust the rules that dictate a resource's compliance posture.

Control MutingPolicy Exceptions
Applied after the control evaluates its state.Applied before the control evaluates its state.
Suppresses alerts.Modifies posture evaluation rules.
Operational flexibility (no impact on posture).Adjusts security posture requirements.
Visibility-only (alerts suppressed, but monitoring continues).Changes control evaluation logic for compliance.
Example: Muting a control in ERROR while resolving an issue.Example: Adding an exception to allow a non-compliant configuration.

Using muting and exceptions together

You can combine muting and exceptions for even greater flexibility:

  • During exception rollout: Mute controls while implementing an approved exception.
  • Gradual policy changes: Use muting to suppress alerts temporarily while the exception is under review or approval.
  • Complex deployments: Combine long-term exceptions with short-term muting during deployments to maintain operational flexibility.

Get started with control muting

Control muting is now available in Guardrails TE v5.48 release. To start using it, navigate to any control in the Guardrails console and click the "Mute" icon in the upper-right corner.

New "Muted" state filters are also available in reports, allowing you to maintain visibility of suppressed controls while prioritizing active issues.

If you’re new to Guardrails, start your 14-day free trial and experience automated cloud governance controls in your environment.