What happens if Cognocient's proxy goes down?
If Cognocient's budget-check layer becomes unreachable, API calls pass through to your AI provider unaffected. You temporarily lose cost visibility and enforcement, but your application keeps working.
If Cognocient's budget-check layer becomes unreachable, API calls pass through to your AI provider unaffected — the check is designed to fail open within a fraction of a second, not hang. You temporarily lose cost visibility and enforcement, but your application keeps working. We prioritize your application's uptime over enforcement: a Cognocient outage should never cause your production AI features to fail.
This is a real, verified behavior — not a promise
This isn't aspirational copy. It's the actual behavior of the budget-check code path, confirmed by reading it directly: on a Redis error the check logs a warning and returns "allowed", rather than raising and blocking the request.
Why fail-open is the right default
Blocking every production LLM call because a cost-tracking layer is temporarily down would trade a minor, recoverable problem — a gap in attribution data — for a major, unrecoverable one: your actual product failing for your users. For the overwhelming majority of teams, a few minutes of unattributed spend is a far smaller cost than a production outage in a customer-facing AI feature. Cognocient is built to protect your uptime first.
The one exception: if a block-mode budget's last known spend was
already over its limit before the outage started, Cognocient keeps
blocking that budget's calls using that last-known value rather than
assuming it's now safe to let everything through blind. Fail-open means
"don't newly block on missing data" — not "ignore data you already have."
What you lose during a fail-open window
- Attribution data for calls made during the outage — cost, tokens, latency, and feature/team tags for those specific calls will be incomplete or delayed until the connection recovers.
- Budget enforcement during the outage — a
block-mode budget will not newly block calls it hasn't already confirmed are over limit.alertanddegrade-mode budgets already never block calls, so nothing changes for those regardless of Redis health.
Nothing about this affects calls that complete successfully — you keep making API calls and getting responses. The gap is purely in cost visibility and enforcement for the duration of the outage.
Monitoring and alerting
Honest gap, not a feature we're hiding
There is currently no dedicated customer-facing alert that fires the
moment a fail-open window starts. The event is logged server-side, but
isn't yet surfaced as a notification. If you have block-mode budgets
and want certainty about enforcement continuity, the most reliable
signal today is a visible gap or delay in attribution data on your
dashboard for a period you know had real traffic — check
Live Calls for the affected window. We're tracking
a dedicated fail-open alert as a roadmap item.
If you have a critical-path AI feature where a temporary enforcement gap is unacceptable regardless of likelihood, treat that as a reason to keep your own downstream rate limits or spend caps as a backstop — not a reason to avoid the proxy, since the alternative (fail-closed) would make a Cognocient outage a worse problem for you than the one it solves.
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