Events and audit

Events and audit records make material work attributable and observable. They are related, but they answer different questions.

Events

An event is a durable fact that something meaningful happened in the business or platform. A governed tool can commit a business change and its event together so consumers never observe one without the other.

Events can wake loops, update projections, notify external systems, and provide evidence for evaluation. The event is a signal to reconcile current state, not a guarantee that one fragile callback ran exactly once.

Audit records

An audit record answers who did what, to which resource or business object, when, and through which invocation. People and agents are attributed the same way. Sensitive platform operations can record audit events even when they do not change a business object.

Audit records complement authorization: authorization decides whether work may happen; audit records what did happen.

Events are not logs

Debug logs explain software execution and can be sampled or discarded. Business events and audit records are durable product data with defined meaning. Do not use log text as the system of record for customer work.

Use in loops and metrics

Events are one source of observations. Objects hold current operational state; events preserve meaningful changes over time. Metrics can query both, and loops can use either as evidence before deciding what to do next.