What is a principle of chaos engineering?

Common user access on monitoring infrastructure is a security and access control issue, not a principle of chaos engineering.

A core principle of chaos engineering is to proactively test the resilience of systems by injecting controlled faults and failures. The goal is to observe how the system responds under stress, identify weaknesses before they cause real outages, and improve the system's ability to withstand turbulent conditions. This continuous, proactive experimentation helps ensure system responsiveness and reliability.

While chaos engineering ultimately helps prevent mistakes by revealing weaknesses, its direct principle is about experimentation and learning from failure, rather than simply preventing mistakes through cautious action. It embraces failure to learn.

Reactive system monitoring for outages describes traditional monitoring, which responds after an incident occurs, whereas chaos engineering is proactive in its approach to discovering vulnerabilities.