Gremlin
Gremlin is a chaos engineering platform for engineering teams that want to uncover failure modes and check reliability before those failures become outages.
What Gremlin is
Gremlin is a chaos engineering platform for engineering teams that want to uncover failure modes and check reliability before those failures become outages. It injects faults into services, hosts, containers, and serverless workloads so teams can examine how systems respond. Blast radius controls help limit experiments, which can halt and roll back automatically if issues arise. Teams can arrange experiments into incident scenarios, schedule them, and use GameDay Manager to prepare, run, analyze, and save results. The platform also includes dependency discovery, standardized test suites and reliability scores, disaster recovery testing, detected risks, and organization-wide benchmarking. It supports public clouds, Linux, Windows, Kubernetes, and on-premises deployments through its self-hosted Private Edition. Documented integrations include Slack, Datadog, Dynatrace, AWS, Azure, Google Cloud Platform, Grafana Cloud k6, Jira, and custom webhooks. The 30-day trial costs nothing, requires no credit card, and does not auto-convert. Platform pricing is by custom quote, with agents, targets, and test volume sized with the customer.
Good
- Fault injection covers services, hosts, containers, and serverless workloads.
- Experiments can halt and roll back automatically.
- GameDay Manager supports preparation, analysis, and result storage.
- Self-hosted Private Edition is available.
- A 30-day trial requires no credit card.
Watch out
- No free plan is listed.
- Platform pricing requires a custom quote.
- Agents, targets, and test volume are sized with the customer.
Who it suits
Gremlin is aimed at SRE and platform teams, including teams in financial services, retail, media, and B2B SaaS. It also suits teams that need self-hosting rather than SaaS.
Verdict
Gremlin combines fault injection, safety controls, and scheduled incident scenarios for reliability work. Teams considering it should account for quote-based platform pricing and the sizing conversation.
Plans and prices
From Gremlin's own pricing page, checked 15 Oct 2001.
| Plan | Price | What it gives you |
|---|---|---|
| Gremlin 30-day trial | Free | Access to Gremlin reliability tests and Chaos Engineering experiments · 30 days; no credit card; never auto-converts |
| Gremlin Platform trial | Free | Trial availability stated on pricing page · 30-day free trial; no credit card; does not auto-convert |
| Gremlin Reliability Management Platform on AWS Marketplace | $45,000 a year | 50 agents · unlimited reliability testing and scoring · fault injection · Failure Flags · 12-month contract |
| Gremlin Foresight AI | Priced on request | Unlimited team members · AI token allowance · supervised resilience agents · remediation patches · closed-loop verification · MCP server/API/chat/LLM skills · Priced per team; adds to a platform license |
| Fault injection suite (stand-alone) | Priced on request | Enterprise fault injection suite · Get a quote |
| Professional Services | Priced on request | Reliability Baseline · Peak Readiness Campaign · Continuous Reliability Roadmap · handoff training · Scoped per engagement |
| Fault injection suite | Priced on request | Enterprise fault-injection suite sold standalone · Get a quote |
| Gremlin Platform | Priced on request | Dependency discovery · fault injection · test suites · reliability scores · disaster-recovery testing · detected risks · benchmarking · Priced per service; custom quote |
The facts
Each one read from Gremlin's own pages, with the date it was checked.
What it does
- Agent installation
- The Gremlin Agent is installed on hosts, containers or Kubernetes clusters and enables the web app, REST API and CLI to run tests.checked 15 Oct 2001
- API
- The public REST API uses the base URL https://api.gremlin.com/v1 and has an OpenAPI specification.checked 15 Oct 2001
- API authentication
- API requests can authenticate with bearer tokens or user and team API keys, with MFA-supported login flows.checked 15 Oct 2001
- Attack types
- The fault library includes CPU, process-killer, memory, certificate-expiry and GPU experiments.checked 15 Oct 2001
- Authentication and audit
- The security page lists SAML 2, Google OAuth2, MFA for password logins, and administrator access logs in JSON format.checked 2 Oct 2001
- Compliance
- Gremlin reports ISO 27001/27017, PCI DSS Level 1, SOC 1/2/3 and SOC 2 Type II coverage for its hosted environment.checked 15 Oct 2001
- Documentation and support
- The documentation site covers installation, authentication, configuration, API reference, integrations, security, release notes and a support center.checked 15 Oct 2001
- Encryption
- The security page says data is protected in transit with TLS and at rest with AES-256, with logically segregated customer data.checked 15 Oct 2001
- Experiment library
- The product includes preconfigured failure scenarios and lets teams create custom scenarios and chain multiple experiments.checked 15 Oct 2001
- Fault injection
- Experiments can target services, hosts, containers and serverless workloads, with automatic halt and rollback controls.checked 15 Oct 2001
- Funding
- Gremlin's milestone history reports a $7.5M Series A in 2017 and an $18M Series B in 2018.checked 15 Oct 2001
- GameDay Manager
- GameDay Manager helps plan events, stores experiment results and connects action items to Jira.checked 15 Oct 2001
- Integrations
- Documented integrations include AWS, Azure, GCP, Jira and configurable REST webhooks.checked 15 Oct 2001
- Intended users
- Gremlin describes its users as SRE and platform teams, and says financial services, retail, media, and B2B SaaS companies use the product.checked 2 Oct 2001
- Kubernetes installation
- Kubernetes can be deployed with an automatically generated YAML file applied using kubectl; Helm is the recommended method generally.checked 15 Oct 2001
- License
- Gremlin's commercial reliability platform is not offered as an open-source product; a G2 reviewer specifically notes that no open-source version is available.checked 15 Oct 2001
- Limit: JVM injection
- The Gartner reviewer says JVM fault injection received less communication and promised capability than expected.checked 15 Oct 2001
- Limit: learning curve and UI
- AWS and PeerSpot reviewers mention a difficult initial learning curve and request a more developer-friendly UI.checked 15 Oct 2001
- Limit: pricing visibility
- AWS reviewers repeatedly call Gremlin expensive and ask for clearer cost, ROI and pay-as-you-go visibility.checked 15 Oct 2001
- MCP and extensibility
- Gremlin documents an MCP server and exposes API, chat and LLM-skill access for Foresight AI.checked 15 Oct 2001
The company
- Company identity
- The site footer identifies the legal entity as Gremlin Inc. in Claymont, Delaware.checked 15 Oct 2001
- Company size
- Gartner lists Gremlin's employee range as 11–50 and its head office location as the United States.checked 15 Oct 2001
- Founded
- Gremlin says it was founded in 2016 by Kolton Andrus, who previously built fault injection at Amazon.checked 15 Oct 2001
Money
- Limit: cost and on-premises coverage
- A G2 reviewer says multi-point experiments require a subscription, on-premises injection support is limited and the lack of an open-source edition is a drawback.checked 15 Oct 2001
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