How AGLedger compares
You already have logs, observability, policy controls, and perhaps a continuous-compliance platform. AGLedger answers a different question from any of them: what did the participants agree to do, what did they deliver, and how did the decision on that delivery get made — signed, ordered, and verifiable by anyone with the public keys.
Which question belongs to which tool
“Did the service crash?” — observability
“Should this agent be allowed to act?” — policy controls
“What tools can this agent use?” — agent guardrails
“What API calls did it make?” — logging
“Did this agent do what it committed to, and can I prove it?” — AGLedger
Adjacent tools in detail
| Tool | What it records | What AGLedger adds |
|---|---|---|
| Application logs | What happened, from the writing system's vantage | What was supposed to happen, who authorized it, and whether the result was accepted — in a form that survives across systems and organizations |
| Observability platforms | System health — metrics, traces, dashboards | Business intent, acceptance criteria, delegation chains, decisions |
| Policy gateways | Allow or deny on a per-call basis (stateless) | Stateful lifecycle — what was committed, what was delivered, what was decided, signed at every step |
| Continuous compliance (Vanta, Drata) | Evidence collected from existing systems after the fact | Records that are audit-ready the moment they're written — no collection step required |
| Manual audit trails | Reconstructions from logs, memory, Slack threads | Real-time structure, tamper evidence, delegation traceability |
| AGLedger | Commitment (what was agreed), delivery (what was done), decision (accept, reject, or request remediation) — signed, hash-chained, verifiable offline | Principal always judges substance. AGLedger enforces structure, never content. |
What's structurally different
Stateful, not stateless. Policy gateways and application logs are stateless — each call evaluated on its own, each log line written in isolation. AGLedger maintains a lifecycle for every unit of work: commitment, delivery, decision, closure. A mandate ID months later reconstructs the full delegation tree.
Signed, not attested. Logs are attributable to the system writing them — you trust the system or you don't. AGLedger records are signed by the party that took the action, with Ed25519. Anyone with the public keys can verify the chain offline; no vendor involvement required.
Audit-ready, not collected. Continuous-compliance platforms scrape existing systems and package findings for an auditor after the fact. AGLedger records are structured as accountability from the moment they're written. There's no collection step because the audit chain is the source.