Declared Versus Observed

Tier: 2 · Normative weight: implements TM-OBS-005–TM-OBS-009 Requires: Governed Read

Problem it removes

Monitoring collapses “could not tell” into pass or fail: an unreachable service reads as stopped, a timeout reads as healthy-enough, and drift between what was declared and what is running is discovered during an incident instead of a read.

Mechanism

A --live mode (or equivalent) on the governed read that observes the running system — service states, remote file digests, HTTP contracts — and compares each observation against the declaration. The rules are exactly the conditional observation requirements:

• Declared and observed stay separate values; an observation never rewrites the declaration it was checking (TM-OBS-005).
• Each observation records source, time, method, expected value, observed value when available, and operational meaning (TM-OBS-006).
• Every comparison is three-valued: match, mismatch, unknown (TM-OBS-007).
• Inaccessibility, timeout, permission failure, or parse failure is unknown — never normalized into an expected state (TM-OBS-008).
• The aggregate is mismatch if any check mismatched, else unknown if any is unknown, else match (TM-OBS-009).

Include deliberate negative checks — an expected 401 proving authentication is enforced is as much a declaration as an expected 200.

Cost

Authoring: days, not hours — each observation kind (service, artifact, endpoint) needs expected values declared and a probe written. Per change: the declaration and the probe move together. Per session: seconds for the offline read; the live read runs when the runtime is the question.

Do not adopt when

Nothing runs — the repository declares no state outside its own tree. The offline governed read already covers it.

Evidence

Assessed in inference-ops, whose --live read observes hosts, service units, remote artifacts, and authenticated endpoints under exactly these semantics. cloud-ops applies the same rules to hosting state.

Template

None — grow it inside the copied governed read; the check shape is already there.

Related patterns

Authority Boundary decides which observed facts this repository may declare expectations about at all.