Guardrail metrics

Guardrail metrics are business metrics that are not expected to change significantly during an experiment. They act as safeguards to alert you about unintended consequences, such as shifts in user behavior or technical bugs, that may negatively impact other areas of the business. While they may not be the primary focus of your analysis, they help ensure that improvements in one metric don't come at the cost of hidden degradation elsewhere.

Metric types

Category	Definition	Examples
Financial	These metrics represent business performance.	Revenue, unsubscribe rates
User Experience	These metrics relate to the measurement of the user experience by observing customer engagement with your product.	Return rate, bounce rate, open rate, clicks, order rate, page load times, app crashes.
Strategic Priority	These metrics may shift over time.	In the first fiscal quarter, the priority is to increase website traffic. In the following quarter, the priority is website downloads.

For more information, see the Harness DevOps Academy article.