What is a cluster environment?
Every cluster in Niro has an environment tag that tells Niro how to treat that cluster. The environment affects policy severity — checks that are informational on a dev cluster can escalate to high severity on a production cluster.Environment values
How environment affects policies
Some policy rules have different severity levels depending on the cluster environment:
Production clusters get louder warnings on the risks that matter most in production: a single-replica deployment or a mutable image tag can cause downtime, and the policy engine reflects that.
Environment is declared by the operator — Niro doesn’t try to infer it from namespace names or labels. This is intentional: an MSP might have a namespace called
production in a dev cluster, or vice versa.Setting the environment
During cluster creation
When you add a new cluster, you can set the environment in the “Add cluster” dialog.After enrollment
Open the cluster detail page → Settings → change the Environment dropdown → save. The change takes effect on the next heartbeat (within ~15 seconds). New policy findings will use the updated severity; existing findings are re-evaluated on the next heartbeat cycle.Environments and policy evaluation
Policy checks run at three points:- Build time — when you fill in the visual builder form. Findings appear inline as you edit.
- Merge time — when a PR is opened against a linked repo. Findings appear as PR comments with the cluster’s current environment in scope.
- Runtime — continuously. Niro evaluates the live pod state against the cluster’s current environment.
Related
- Policies & Standards — full list of policy rules and how they’re evaluated
- Clusters — cluster lifecycle and settings