The audit trail

The audit trail is a readable record of every change across your vault — what happened, when, and by whom — that you can verify, not just review.

Where time-travel lives inside a single note, the audit trail zooms out to your whole vault. It's a running log of the changes Altretta has recorded, presented for you to read and check. And because every entry maps to a signed action in the DAG, the audit isn't just a display — it's evidence.

The audit trail and time-travel draw from the same source: the signed, append-only action history. One shows you a note's story; the other shows your vault's.

What the audit trail shows

What changed — the actions recorded across your notes: content and links written into the graph, facts retracted when a note goes away, and ingests.
When — the order and timing, fixed by the hash-linked chain so it can't be quietly rearranged.
By whom — authorship, carried by the signature on each action.

Why it's trustworthy

A log is only as good as your ability to trust it. Most "activity feeds" are just app state — easy to lose, easy to fabricate, impossible to verify. Altretta's audit is different because it's backed by cryptography:

Append-only in normal use. Entries are added, not rewritten. (The one exception is an explicit prune, which is a deliberate, reported action — see the MCP tool reference.)
Signed. Each recorded action is Ed25519-signed, so entries can't be forged.
Hash-linked. Every action references the one before it, so gaps or tampering break the chain and show up.

Obsidian has no audit of changes — the app doesn't keep one.
Logseq can surface Git history, but that log is mutable and unsigned, so it can be rewritten after the fact.
Altretta's audit trail is signed and append-only — a record you can actually stand behind.

Removals stay in the record

When knowledge goes away, the audit trail shows the signed retraction rather than a silent gap. So the trail is honest about the full lifecycle of your knowledge — including what was taken away, and when.

Deleting a note is not itself an audit entry: the file moves to the vault's .trash/ folder, and what surfaces in the record is the retraction of the facts that note contributed, on the next indexing pass. Renames likewise show up through their effect on the graph, not as a separate "renamed" event. To recover a deleted note, use .trash/ or its version history.

This is what makes Altretta suitable when you need to account for your knowledge — research integrity, compliance, team accountability, or simply proving to your future self what you knew and did.

Enterprise audit export

For teams that have to hand the record to someone else — an auditor, a regulator, a court — Altretta produces an Enterprise audit export: a device-signed, point-in-time envelope of the hash-chained audit log. It captures the state of the record at the moment of export and signs it with the exporting device's key, so the file itself is tamper-evident.

The point of the envelope is that anyone can verify it offline, with no access to your vault or to Altretta's servers:

Chain integrity. The hash links inside the envelope are re-checked end to end, so any gap, reorder, or edit breaks verification.
Roster-anchored attribution. Each action's authorship is resolved against the team roster, so "by whom" is anchored to real team identities rather than an unverifiable name string.

The Enterprise audit export is part of Altretta's Enterprise capabilities. It turns your always-on signed history into a portable, independently verifiable artifact you can share outside the team.

Querying the record

The audit trail is a view over the same signed history exposed to your connected AI and tools via MCP, so the record can be queried programmatically too:

aingle_dag_history — walk the recorded actions.
aingle_dag_tips — see the latest actions at the tips of the DAG.
aingle_dag_stats — summary statistics across the action history.

Understand the record it's built on in Signed history (the DAG).
Check the evidence behind a citation in Provenance & proofs.

Verifiable knowledge

Back to the verifiable section overview.

Enterprise

Where the device-signed, offline-verifiable audit export lives.

Team roles

The roster that anchors "by whom" in every audited action.

Activity log & consistency review

The AI-facing companion to the vault-wide audit trail.

MCP tools reference

The aingle_dag_* tools for querying the record programmatically.

Glossary

Audit envelope, roster, hash-chain, tombstone — defined.