Understand DIAL
This section explains what DIAL is, what it provides, how it is built, and how it is governed. It answers "what" and "why"; setup and configuration live in Building with DIAL and Operating DIAL. It is for evaluators, architects, and developers, and it assumes no prior DIAL knowledge.
What is DIAL
The problem DIAL solves, what it provides, and where it fits in an existing AI stack. Start here if you are new to DIAL.
Foundations
The shared vocabulary behind the rest of the documentation: how the platform's parts relate and what each term means.
- Concept map — how Core, adapters, applications, Toolsets, interceptors, and the UI layers fit together
- Glossary — the canonical definition of each term
Capabilities
What DIAL provides, one capability per page: model access, multimodality, load balancing, guardrails, analytics, tools and enterprise data, agents, coding agents, evaluations, and collaboration.
Architecture
How DIAL is built: its services, how requests move through them, what you deploy and operate, and where the limits are.
Security and governance
How DIAL decides who can reach the platform, what each caller may do, how much they may consume, and where data protection depends on the systems you connect.
Where to start
| If you are… | Read first |
|---|---|
| New to DIAL | What is DIAL, then the Concept map |
| Evaluating what DIAL can do | Capabilities |
| Assessing DIAL for your architecture | Architecture highlights and Trade-offs and limitations |
| Reviewing security and compliance | Security and governance and Guardrails |