Evidence Snapshots
An evidence snapshot is a preserved reading of what your application believed was true at a specific decision moment.
StateMirror stores these snapshots immutably. It does not decide outcomes, interpret payloads, or prove the real-world truth of what was submitted.
Treat StateMirror like an oscilloscope or flight recorder:
- You choose where to probe.
- You choose when to capture.
- You choose what facts to preserve.
- The instrument preserves the submitted reading faithfully.
The snapshot is the reading. Interpretation belongs to your application, operators, and review process.
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
- provenance metadata: optional source or correlation context
This should be moment-level evidence, not a general event stream.
- Intent. StateMirror does not know why you tried to do something.
- Events. It does not reconstruct history from event streams.
- Outcomes. It does not decide permit, deny, grant, revoke, approve, or reject.
- Truth. It does not prove the submitted state was correct.
- Analytics. No payload search, aggregations, or dashboards.
Logs answer: what happened?
StateMirror answers: what did the system preserve as evidence at that moment?
This reduces data archaeology during disputes, appeals, audits, and escalations. The snapshot becomes a stable reference that can be attached to tickets and reviewed later.
- 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.