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Core concepts

Observations

Understand the redacted evidence Seamward records.

Redacted by default

The collector creates structural evidence in the customer process. Seamward does not need the raw request body to detect supported contract drift.

Observation envelope

Review the metadata and redacted structures in one observation.

An observation records a versioned event identifier, direction, protocol, occurrence time, transport result, deployment context, correlation hashes, schema fingerprint, structural shape, and business outcome. Payload storage defaults to none.

Correlation

Connect observations with releases, commits, and business identifiers.

  • Use traceId to follow a request across services.
  • Hash provider event and idempotency identifiers before transmission.
  • Attach a release and commit SHA to identify the code that processed the event.

Collection failures

Understand how collector errors remain isolated from the application.

Collection is fail-open. The wrapped handler result or error remains authoritative while failed delivery is reflected in collector queue and delivery counters.

  • Application behavior does not depend on Seamward availability.
  • Bounded queues prevent unbounded memory growth.
  • Shutdown flushing is explicit through stop().