Technical report / Version 1

From Agent Observability to Governance Evidence: A Privacy-Constrained Telemetry Contract

Imran Siddique

OPAQUE Systems

September 27, 2026Not peer reviewed

Abstract

Agent observability conventions describe model, tool, and agent operations, but governance facts are commonly fragmented across policy engines, approval stores, cost modules, and audit systems. Copying those facts into ordinary traces creates two hazards: sensitive payload capture and the false inference that sampled operational telemetry is complete audit evidence. This technical report describes AgenTrust Telemetry, a backend-neutral contract for six governance event families: policy decisions, approval lifecycles, usage, classified data flows, action execution, and evidence lifecycle. The contract correlates with W3C Trace Context and OpenTelemetry without installing a provider, exporter, or competing tracing model. A metadata-only profile rejects prompts, outputs, source code, tool arguments and results, credentials, and authorization tokens by key. Durable run and action identifiers survive process and asynchronous handoffs; propagated metadata remains untrusted and does not confer identity or authority. An optional accumulator accepts events before lossy export and can be finalized into a separately verifiable TRACE record. Its completeness status is a producer assertion that the accumulator records but does not measure. The evaluated release, 0.1.0-alpha.2, ships Python and TypeScript reference SDKs over shared schemas and a portable conformance set of six valid and seven invalid fixtures. At that commit 111 Python unit tests pass and all 13 fixtures produce their expected verdicts, on September 3, 2026 and again when rerun for this edition. A defect found after the evaluation let an edited evidence snapshot be signed; it is reported beside the results it qualifies. The contribution is not another agent tracing convention; it is a narrow semantic boundary between operational observation and governance evidence whose completeness must be stated rather than inferred.

What this report contributes

A backend-neutral contract for six governance event families that keeps lossy operational telemetry separate from evidence whose completeness is stated.

Evidence and limits

The source package preserves the recorded inputs and results. The Python results were rerun at the evaluated commit for this edition; the TypeScript suite was not rerun. No independent replication is claimed.

Read the current specification and implementation guidance. This report describes an earlier design and evaluation; the current specification governs implementation.

Cite this report

Imran Siddique. From Agent Observability to Governance Evidence: A Privacy-Constrained Telemetry Contract. AgenTrust technical report, version 1, 2026.

Download BibTeX / Download CITATION.cff

@techreport{agentrust2026agentrusttelemetry,
  title = {From Agent Observability to Governance Evidence: A Privacy-Constrained Telemetry Contract},
  author = {Imran Siddique},
  institution = {AgenTrust},
  year = {2026},
  type = {Technical report},
  note = {Version 1; not peer reviewed},
  doi = {10.5281/zenodo.23022882},
  url = {https://agentrust-io.com/research/agentrust-telemetry/v1/}
}

Version history

Version 1, September 27, 2026: Aligns claims with the evaluated code, positions the contract against prior governance telemetry work, and adds a post-evaluation findings section.

Revises a manuscript dated September 3, 2026.

File checksums. Published version files are retained; substantive revisions receive a new version.

Questions and corrections

Open an issue in the project repository and identify the report version and section.