51. Frequently asked questions

The questions we get asked the most, with honest answers.

Pricing and plans

Is there a free tier? A 14-day trial of the Team plan, no card required. After that you’re on Starter unless you upgrade. Starter has paid elements plus a small free quota for evaluation. See Chapter 46.

Can I pay annually for a discount? Yes, on Team and Business — 15% off when prepaid annually. Email [email protected].

What if I exceed my plan’s quota? You stay in service. Overage is billed at standard per-unit rates on the next invoice.

Can I bring my own LLM keys? Enterprise only.

Do you have an academic / non-profit rate? Yes. Email [email protected] to set it up.

Does running my own GPU lower my bill? Yes — substantially. Inference served by a card you connect is zero per-call cost at the Daalu layer. The more of your traffic that lands on your own GPU, the lower your inference line. See Chapter 47.

Security and compliance

Is Daalu SOC 2 / ISO 27001 certified? We’re in active progress. Current status is on the trust portal at https://daalu.io/trust.

Where is my data stored? Two regions: US-East (primary) and EU-Central (the default for EU customers). You can specify at signup or later. Cross-region replication is opt-in.

Is data encrypted at rest? Yes — AES-256 on volumes and tablespaces. Secrets are additionally encrypted in the application layer.

Is data encrypted in transit? Yes — TLS 1.3 everywhere, and WireGuard for the federation tunnel.

Can Daalu engineers see my data? Only when investigating a support ticket, and always with logging. We don’t run automated analytics on customer data. Details at https://daalu.io/trust/access and in the Engineering & Operations manual.

Can I review the platform’s architecture for a compliance need? Yes — talk to us. We can walk your security team through the architecture, the data-flow boundaries, and the tenant-isolation model in as much depth as your review requires. If you have a specific data-residency constraint, Daalu Private keeps your tenant’s data and agents inside your own cluster.

What about GDPR / CCPA? We comply with both. Data export and right-to-be-forgotten are at Settings → Tenant → Privacy.

Architecture

Why WireGuard for federation, not a VPN-as-a-service? Outbound-only, auditable, kernel-level, universally available, and not a vendor we depend on. The tradeoff is operational complexity inside the edge pod, which we absorb. See Chapter 15.

Why is the operator app SaaS and not self-hosted? We move fast against a single deploy target. For strict data-residency needs, Daalu Private runs your tenant’s data plane in your cluster today; fully self-hosted is a roadmap item.

Why Postgres, not <other DB>? Boring choice; it works. Your data lives in managed Postgres with daily encrypted backups.

Does Daalu have a public API? Yes — see Chapter 53 and the live schema at https://ops.daalu.io/docs.

The AI Assistant

What model does the Assistant use? Whatever the router picks for the call: your own GPU, the Daalu-hosted tier, or a commercial model. The reply detail shows which one answered.

Does the Assistant have my source code? No. It sees what your integrations expose — logs through Loki, metrics through Prometheus, alerts and events through Daalu’s own model. It does not crawl your repositories. (The Coding Workspace is a separate, opt-in environment with its own boundaries.)

Can the Assistant call AWS directly? Only with write-tool permission you grant. Even then, write operations go through the change-proposal mechanism.

Why does the Assistant sometimes refuse? Usually one of:

• The action needs a write permission it doesn’t have.
• The action is destructive and needs explicit in-chat confirmation.
• There’s no tool for it.

Why does it occasionally give wrong information? LLMs do. It cites sources in its answers — double-check when the stakes are high. Feedback via Help → Feedback genuinely improves the system over time.

Source of Truth

Does Daalu support NetBox? Not today — Nautobot only. NetBox was on the original roadmap but is deferred while we deepen Nautobot support. See Chapter 14.

Does Daalu support [my CMDB]? Probably, via the webhooks integration. Talk to support about a dedicated adapter if it’s a common one.

Can Daalu push to my switches without root credentials? Daalu uses whatever credentials you configured — pulled from Nautobot’s secret store or set in Settings → Tenant → Device credentials. Grant the narrowest permissions the operations you want actually need.

Your own GPU

Do I need a Kubernetes cluster to use my own GPU? Yes. The serving stack deploys onto a cluster you join through Daalu Edge. See Chapter 31.

Can I use a workstation as a GPU node? Yes, if it runs k3s / microk8s and is reachable through the federation tunnel. We have customers running this from a single beefy workstation in an office closet.

What if my GPU is busy with other workloads? The serving pod requests its share via Kubernetes scheduling. If the card is fully utilized, it waits or pre-empts based on your PriorityClass.

Which cards are supported? The two common classes are ada-16 (RTX 2000 Ada, 16 GB) and ada-48 (RTX 6000 Ada, 48 GB). The class decides which models you can serve — see Chapter 31.

Can I serve a custom fine-tuned model? Not in the standard deployment. Talk to us if it’s a requirement.

Migrations and data portability

How do I migrate from <competitor>? We have guides for Datadog, PagerDuty, and a few others at https://docs.daalu.io/migrations/. Most include a script that ingests alerts / events from the other tool’s export.

How do I export my data out of Daalu? Settings → Tenant → Export gives you a JSON dump of everything: integrations, alerts, proposals, audit logs.

What happens to my data if I cancel? 30 days of read-only access on a special URL, then deletion.

Support

What’s the response SLA? Plan-dependent. Starter: best-effort. Team: 1 business day. Business: 1 hour for P1, 4 hours for P2, 1 business day otherwise. Enterprise: contracted.

How do I escalate a P1? In-product chat → “This is a P1.” That’s the trigger; the on-call human gets paged.

Do you have phone support? Enterprise only.

What’s the general support address? [email protected].

Next: Chapter 52 — Glossary