Set Up an Air-Gapped Confident Agent

Overview

The Confident Agent is designed for locked-down networks. It never accepts inbound connections—it dials out to Confident AI over WebSocket Secure (WSS) and keeps the tunnel open, so evaluation traffic reaches your internal endpoints without exposing them to the public internet. This makes it a good fit for air-gapped and egress-restricted environments where inbound ports are closed and outbound traffic is tightly controlled.

How It Works

The agent establishes a single outbound WSS connection on port 443 to Confident AI's relay. All evaluation requests and responses flow through this one tunnel—there is nothing to expose inbound.

sequenceDiagram
    participant E as Your Internal Endpoint
    participant A as Confident Agent
    participant F as Egress Firewall
    participant C as Confident AI

    A->>F: Outbound WSS (443) — dial out only
    F->>C: Allowed by egress allowlist
    Note over A,C: WebSocket Secure tunnel established

    C->>A: Forward evaluation request
    A->>E: Call internal endpoint (in-network)
    E-->>A: Return response
    A-->>C: Relay response back over WSS

Requirements

• Outbound WSS on port 443 from the machine running the agent to Confident AI's relay. WebSocket Secure is the only protocol the agent uses to reach Confident AI.
• In-network access from the agent to your internal API endpoint.
• No inbound ports—nothing needs to be opened for traffic coming into your network.
• The confidentai/confident-agent container image available inside your network (see Distributing the Image for pulling it into an internal registry).

Outbound Connectivity

The agent connects to Confident AI over WSS at:

wss://deepeval.confident-ai.com/ws/relay

Your egress firewall must allow this outbound connection on port 443. You have two options for the allowlist:

1. Preferred — allow all outbound on 443

   Allow unrestricted outbound HTTPS/WSS on port 443. This is the simplest and most resilient option: it survives any change to Confident AI's underlying infrastructure (such as IP rotations behind the load balancer) with no action on your side.

2. Restricted — whitelist Confident AI's relay

   If your policy forbids blanket outbound access, whitelist only the destination the agent needs to reach the relay over WebSocket. Where possible, allowlist by hostname (deepeval.confident-ai.com) so DNS-based rules keep working across infrastructure changes.

   If your firewall requires an IP-based allowlist, you'll need the specific IP address(es) the relay accepts WebSocket connections on.

Distributing the Image

In an air-gapped environment the deployment host usually can't pull from Docker Hub. Mirror the confidentai/confident-agent image into a registry that your isolated network can reach.

On a machine with internet access, pull the image and push it to your internal registry:

docker pull confidentai/confident-agent
docker tag confidentai/confident-agent <your-internal-registry>/confident-agent
docker push <your-internal-registry>/confident-agent

Alternatively, save the image to a tarball and transfer it across the air gap:

# On a connected machine
docker save confidentai/confident-agent -o confident-agent.tar

# After transferring confident-agent.tar into the isolated network
docker load -i confident-agent.tar

Deploying the Agent

Once the image is available inside your network, run the agent pointing at your internal registry (or the loaded image) and the relay URL.

docker run -d \
  -e CONFIDENT_API_KEY=<your-api-key> \
  -e CONFIDENT_WS_BASE_URL=wss://deepeval.confident-ai.com/ws/relay \
  <your-internal-registry>/confident-agent

services:
  confident-agent:
    image: <your-internal-registry>/confident-agent
    restart: unless-stopped
    environment:
      - CONFIDENT_API_KEY=${CONFIDENT_API_KEY}
      - CONFIDENT_WS_BASE_URL=${CONFIDENT_WS_BASE_URL:-wss://deepeval.confident-ai.com/ws/relay}

docker compose up -d

See Confident Agent → Environment Variables for the full list of configuration options.

Verifying Connectivity

After starting the agent, confirm the outbound tunnel came up:

• Check the container logs for a successful WSS connection message:

  docker logs -f confident-agent

• In Confident AI, open your AI Connection and click Ping Endpoint. A 200 response means the request was tunneled through the agent to your internal endpoint and back.

If the connection never establishes, the most common cause is an egress firewall blocking outbound WSS on 443—revisit Outbound Connectivity.

Last updated on July 28, 2026