Chapter 4 of 8 — Governance in Action
What did the runtime do to that log, field by field?
Governance is not a black box. Every decision has a reason. This chapter walks through the checkout log one field at a time and shows exactly what the runtime evaluated, what action it took, and why.
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Step 1 of 3
Where governance runs in your stack
The CerbiStream SDK hooks into your logging provider at application startup — no sidecar, no proxy, no network hop. When your code calls
logger.LogInformation(...), the message and structured fields are handed to the CerbiStream middleware before they reach any output sink. The middleware loads the active profile, evaluates each field, assembles the governed payload, and passes that to the sink. The raw payload is discarded in memory. It is never written anywhere.Your logger.Log(...) call
→
CerbiStream middleware
→
Governed payload to sink
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Step 2 of 3
The pipeline — every field evaluated
Below is the full evaluation of the checkout log. Each row is one field. The runtime processes them in order: load the profile, check disallowedFields, check requiredFields, pass everything else. Click any row to read the exact reason for the decision.
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Step 3 of 3
The governed payload — what actually reached your sink
After the pipeline runs, the runtime assembles the governed payload. This is the only version of the log that any output sink ever sees — Datadog, Elasticsearch, CloudWatch, S3, wherever you route logs. The raw value of
creditCardNumber exists nowhere outside your application process. It was never serialised. It was never written to disk or network.Raw payload (developer wrote)
{
"userId": "user-4281",
"creditCardNumber": "4111111111111111",
"message": "Checkout started..."
// correlationId: missing
// eventName: missing
}Governed payload (what the sink received)
{
"userId": "user-4281",
"creditCardNumber": "REDACTED",
"message": "Checkout started..."
// correlationId: absent → Medium violation
// eventName: absent → Medium violation
}Chapter 5 of 8
The Dashboard Record — the immutable audit trail of every decision