Charon Overview

stygian-charon is the diagnostics and planning crate for anti-bot operations in the Stygian stack. It converts request/response evidence into reproducible assessments and actionable runtime acquisition guidance.

What Charon provides

Capability	Outcome
HAR forensics	Convert HAR payloads into normalized anti-bot reports
Provider classification	Detect likely providers (for example Cloudflare/DataDome patterns)
Target-aware SLO assessment	Score blocked-ratio health by target class
Runtime policy planning	Produce retry, warmup, and escalation guidance
Acquisition mapping	Translate policy into acquisition mode hints
Snapshot drift checks	Validate and compare normalized fingerprint snapshots

Target classes

Charon supports target-aware behavior so the same blocked ratio can be interpreted differently for different systems:

Api
ContentSite
HighSecurity

Use these classes when inferring SLO requirements and selecting escalation posture.

Feature flags

Feature	Purpose
`metrics`	Emit counters and blocked-ratio aggregates for observability
`caching`	Enable in-memory caching for repeated investigations
`redis-cache`	Add Redis-backed caching on top of `caching`
`live-validation`	Enable live URL validation example tooling

Core workflow

Investigate HAR evidence into a normalized report.
Infer requirements for the target class and current SLO posture.
Build a runtime policy from observed behavior.
Map that policy into acquisition hints for graph runners/adapters.

This keeps diagnostics deterministic and portable across teams and environments.

Next steps

Continue with Getting Started.
Review SLO & Policy Planning.
Use Operations & Runbooks for rollout and incident response.