Sample evidence pack
This is what the change-management evidence a reviewer samples looks like, produced by
switchtender audit report over a real chain. It is the artifact you hand an auditor or a
prospect's security team. See Compliance mapping for which control clauses each
column answers.
The instance below uses fictional accounts and playbook names and touches no real infrastructure, so nothing here is redacted; on your own instance the same report carries your real changes. The chain it was rendered from verifies and is anchored to a public timestamp authority, so the header reads:
The chain verifies and carries 1 anchor(s) fixing it outside this install.
The period at a glance
| Changes | Approved | Rejected | Failed |
|---|---|---|---|
| 6 | 4 | 1 | 2 |
Every change in the period
| When (UTC) | Change | Actor | Source | Risk | Held by | Decision | Outcome |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 2026-08-10 11:50 | ansible deploy/site.yml | alice-deploy | api | medium | gate-all-production-change | Approved by platform-admin #10 | failed |
| 2026-08-10 11:50 | ansible tls/rotate-certs.yml | alice-deploy | api | medium | gate-all-production-change | Approved by platform-admin #11 | failed |
| 2026-08-10 11:50 | ansible web/restart-nginx.yml | alice-deploy | api | medium | gate-all-production-change | Rejected by platform-admin #12 | rejected |
| 2026-08-10 11:50 | ansible db/apply-migrations.yml | alice-deploy | api | medium | gate-all-production-change | — | pending_approval |
| 2026-08-10 11:51 | bash echo deploy complete | alice-deploy | api | low | gate-all-production-change | Approved by platform-admin #15 | succeeded |
| 2026-08-10 11:51 | bash echo cache purged on edge fleet | alice-deploy | api | low | gate-all-production-change | Approved by platform-admin #16 | succeeded |
How to read it
- Held by names the approval policy that stopped every change, so a reviewer sees the gate was in force, not that these six happened to be caught.
- Decision is the chain-recorded approval or rejection, with the approver and the entry number
the decision landed at (
#10), so it is redeemable against the chain rather than a field the server asserts.alice-deploy, an operator, submitted every change;platform-admindecided each one, which is the separation of requester and approver a change-management control expects. - Outcome is honest, not curated. Two approved changes then failed at execution, one change was rejected and never ran, one is still awaiting a decision, and two succeeded. An audit trail that only ever showed green would be the one to distrust.
- Nothing in the row exposes a secret. The chain also commits to a redacted digest of each change's payload, so the record proves what changed without carrying the credentials the change used.
Produce your own
# a period's change register
switchtender audit report --from 2026-07-01 --to 2026-08-01 --out evidence.html
# one change in depth: spec, approvals, per-host outcomes, receipts, anchors
switchtender audit run <run-id> --out run-dossier.html
# fix the chain in time so a lost tail is detectable, then re-report
switchtender audit anchor
The Assurance service (design partners) assembles these on a cadence, mapped to your controls and written
to an archive, so the sample a review asks for exists before anyone asks. The report itself, the
free --evidence-dir scheduling, and verifying it all offline stay free in the core.