THE OPERATIONAL PROBLEM
A polished report can still be wrong.
When a source is stale, incomplete, unavailable, or silently changes schema, the last known value can look current. A useful monitoring system must preserve source evidence and make the trust state part of the output.
CONTROL PATH
Check trust before making a claim.
- 01Collect
Read only predefined synthetic fixtures with an explicit authorization rationale.
- 02Validate
Check freshness, completeness, schema, and availability for each source.
- 03Classify
Mark the report trusted, degraded, or unavailable and retain supporting evidence.
- 04Withhold
Emit no material claim when a critical source contract fails; delivery remains disabled.
VERIFICATION EVIDENCE
What was actually checked.
- 8 automated tests passHealth, source boundaries, trusted reporting, valid no change, degradation, partial failure, withholding, and input validation.
- 5 scenarios are reproducibleHealthy data, valid no change, stale critical input, partial outage, and critical schema change.
- Stale data is not relabelled currentThe unavailable-source path explicitly refuses to present its previous value as a current signal.
- Critical contract failures withhold claimsThe schema-change case emits no material aggregate changes and records
report_withheld. - Zero external deliveriesEvery seeded and interactive run keeps report delivery disabled.
HONEST LIMITS
This proves a trust model—not permission to collect.
Signal Brief does not prove compatibility with a client source, permission to collect any public page, production security, or quantified business impact. A real deployment requires source-owner authorization, authenticated sources, encrypted credentials, versioned data contracts, scheduling and retry policies, monitoring, and an owner-approved delivery channel.