Evidence Snapshots
An evidence snapshot is the submitted reading of what your application preserved at a specific decision moment.
StateMirror preserves these submitted snapshots with integrity metadata for later retrieval and review.
What is captured
StateMirror receives one evidence envelope at capture time:
- evidence_ref: your stable reference for this evidence moment
- evidence_type: a coarse category for retrieval
- captured_at: your timestamp for when the evidence was captured
- state_payload: the computed facts you chose to preserve
- optional Evidence Lanes: PlanEvidence, DenialEvidence, and ExpiryEvidence when those canonical shapes help organize the submitted payload
- provenance metadata: optional source or correlation context
This should be moment-level evidence, not a general event stream.
Capture only establishes what your application submitted. See the specification’s non-claims and failure modes for the limits of verification.
Why it exists
Logs answer: what happened?
StateMirror answers: what did the system preserve as evidence at that moment?
This reduces post-hoc reconstruction during support questions and engineering review. The snapshot becomes a stable reference that can be attached to tickets and reviewed later.
Failure modes
- Not captured. If you do not submit evidence at the moment, StateMirror cannot invent it later.
- Partial capture. If your payload omits a fact, the snapshot will not contain it.
- Bad clocks. captured_at is your timestamp; received_at is StateMirror’s timestamp. Drift is expected.
- Retry duplicates. Use idempotency to make retry behavior explicit.
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