GxP & Quilt
GxP is the general abbreviation for "Good x Practice", where the "x" represents the domain that the guidelines and regulations apply to. Together the regulations constitute a collection of quality guidelines for the bio/pharmaceutical industries.
As a decentralized data platform for your organization, Quilt provides a series of operational quality metrics through a status monitoring system.
The Quilt status monitoring system consists of four parts:
- 1.Canaries: A collection of end-to-end quality tests for key operational functionality provided by Quilt. They are run on a schedule in your AWS infrastructure.
- 2.Status reports: Simple HTML files generated on a daily schedule by an AWS Lambda function (
status_reports
) and stored in a dedicated Amazon S3 bucket. The HTML files contain the most recent canary run results (Operational Qualification) and Quilt instance Cloud Formation parameters and outputs (Infrastructure Qualification). - 3.Operational Qualification report: all canary test results and status (historical and current)
- 4.Infrastructue Qualification report: all CloudFormation parameters and status
- 5.Administrative User Interface: An HTML page in the Quilt catalog that displays the current operational status of a Quilt instance and provides access to current and historical status reports.
- 6.Amazon SNS topic: Users can subscribe to the topic and recieve canary error notifications (available as
CanaryNotificationsTopic
stack output).

In order to enable status monitoring for a Quilt instance, the following conditions must be met:
- The Quilt instance CloudFormation template must have canaries enabled
- The correct template parameters must be provided during the Quilt instance CloudFormation deployment
The required Quilt and AWS resources are provisioned automatically by the Quilt deployment.
There are currently four end-to-end quality tests:
BucketAccessControl
: Test that Users can only access specifically allowed Amazon S3 bucketsImmutable URIs
: Test to resolve immutable Quilt URIsPackagePushUi
: Test packagepush
functionality via Quilt catalog package creation dialogSearch
: Search S3 objects and Quilt packages in the Quilt catalog
When deploying a Quilt instance using a CloudFormation template with canaries enabled, you will have to provide the following parameters:
CanaryNotificationsEmail
(if enabled): A valid email address to send canary failure and error notifications
Go to your Quilt web-based catalog administration panel, "Status" tab (under the /admin/status URL). There you can see the stack's current operational status (as well as the chart with historic data for the last month) and the reports table (which can be sorted / filtered) where you can preview or download stored reports (HTML files).

For convenience, the following canary-related events are forwarded to an SNS topic (available as
CanaryNotificationsTopic
in the Quilt instance CloudFormation deployment Outputs tab):- 1.A canary entering error state
- 2.A canary run failure
Quilt administrators can subscribe to this SNS topic to receive these event notifications and process them appropriately (e.g. notifying first responders or sending to incident management systems).
If enabled (see set-up instructions above), these events will be also sent as emails to the configured address (
CanaryNotificationsEmail
CloudFormation template parameter).Last modified 4mo ago