Manage guardrails
How to add, configure, order, and save the guardrails on a Sentinel
Each Sentinel runs its own guardrail policy — the guardrails applied to inbound traffic, in the order you set. Admins manage that policy per gateway from the SUPERWISE® app, so different Sentinels can enforce different rules. Read-only users can view the policy but not change it.
Open a Sentinel and go to the Guardrails tab. The input pipeline lists the active guardrails in execution order, each showing its action and average added latency.
Add or remove a guardrail
- Add — click Add guardrail and pick from the catalog: Secret & credential detection, PII redaction, Rudeness & toxicity, Language check, Image resolution, and Image sharpness. Most guardrails check the prompt's text; Image resolution and Image sharpness check the images attached to it.
- Remove — use the delete icon on a guardrail; it's marked Removed until you save (click Restore to undo).
Edit a guardrail
Select a guardrail to open its editor, where you set its behavior and parameters.
Action when triggered
Choose what happens when the guardrail matches:
- Remediate — fix and forward. Each matched value is replaced with your Replacement text (default
REDACTED, which appears in the prompt as{{REDACTED}}) and the request continues to the model. - Block — reject the request. Set the Error message returned to the caller.
Some guardrails only support one action. Language check, Image resolution, and Image sharpness, for example, can only block — there's nothing to redact.
Blocking and conversation history
Sentinel checks each request on its own, over the whole prompt it receives — including the full conversation history. Agentic tools like Claude Code and the Codex CLI resend that entire history on every turn, so a message that triggered a guardrail once stays in the history and is sent again and again.
With a block action this can wedge a session: once a turn's content matches, every later turn replays it and is blocked too, even when the new message is fine. Remediate doesn't have this problem — it redacts the match and lets each turn through. So for content that can recur in history, prefer remediate over block, and if a session does get stuck on a blocked guardrail, start a new conversation so the triggering message is no longer in the history.
Parameters
Some guardrails expose parameters:
- PII redaction lets you choose the detected categories — pick exactly which identifier types to scan for (see PII redaction).
- Language check lets you set the allowed (or blocked) languages and a confidence threshold (see Language check).
- Image resolution lets you set a maximum or minimum and the width × height limit in pixels (see Image resolution).
- Image sharpness lets you set a minimum sharpness score below which an image is blocked as too blurry (see Image sharpness).
Test sandbox
Before you commit a guardrail's settings, test them in the editor's Test sandbox. Provide a sample request — text for a text guardrail, or an image for Image resolution and Image sharpness — click Run test, and Sentinel evaluates it against the guardrail's staged configuration and shows the outcome:
- Passes — the request wouldn't be touched.
- Would remediate — the matched content, with your replacement text applied, so you can see exactly what the model would receive.
- Would block — the request would be rejected, with the error message the caller would get.
The sandbox runs the check in the control plane and doesn't affect live traffic or telemetry, so you can iterate on parameters and the action until the outcome is what you want, then apply and save.
Order the pipeline
Guardrails run in order on each request. Drag a guardrail to reposition it in the input pipeline — for example, to redact secrets before running other checks.
Apply and save
Edits are staged in two steps:
- In a guardrail's editor, click Apply changes to stage them.
- On the Sentinel page, click Save changes to publish the policy — or Discard to revert.
Saved changes take effect on the Sentinel's next heartbeat — gateways pull their policy from the control plane about once a minute. A guardrail introduced in a newer release also needs the gateway to be running a current image; if a guardrail you added doesn't take effect, see Keep your Sentinel up to date.
Editing a Sentinel's guardrails is an admin action. Read-only users can view the policy but can't change it.
Get Sentinel: Create a free SUPERWISE account.
See also
- Guardrails: what each guardrail catches.
- Manage users: who can change a policy.
- Operational dashboard: see what your guardrails remediate and block.
Updated 6 days ago