Governance Replay
Governance Replay lets you replay historical governance decisions through your current policies, revealing how policy changes would have affected past outcomes.
Overview
When you modify governance policies, you need to understand the impact. Governance Replay takes a set of historical governed actions and re-evaluates them against your current (or draft) policy configuration, showing you a side-by-side comparison of original verdicts versus what the current policies would produce.
How It Works
Select a Time Range -- Choose the historical period you want to replay. This pulls all governed actions from the Audit Trail within that window.
Choose a Policy Set -- Select which policies to replay against:
- Current production policies -- See how today's policies would have handled past actions
- Draft policies -- Test proposed changes against real historical data
Run Replay -- TheWARDN re-evaluates every action from the selected time range against the chosen policy set.
Review Results -- Compare original verdicts with replayed verdicts.
Replay Results
The results view shows a table with each replayed action:
| Column | Description |
|---|---|
| Timestamp | When the action was originally governed |
| Agent | The agent that submitted the action |
| Action Type | What the agent attempted |
| Original Verdict | The verdict that was actually rendered |
| Replayed Verdict | The verdict that would be rendered under the selected policies |
| Changed | Whether the verdict differs between original and replayed |
Summary Statistics
At the top of the results, a summary shows:
- Total actions replayed
- Number of unchanged verdicts
- Number of changed verdicts
- Breakdown of changes: CLEARED to HELD, CLEARED to BLOCKED, HELD to CLEARED, HELD to BLOCKED, BLOCKED to CLEARED, BLOCKED to HELD
TIP
Pay special attention to actions that would change from CLEARED to BLOCKED or BLOCKED to CLEARED. These represent the most significant impact of a policy change -- actions that were previously allowed would now be denied, or vice versa.
Use Cases
Policy Validation
Before deploying a policy change, replay the last 30 days of history to see how many actions would be affected. This gives you a concrete measure of the change's impact.
Incident Investigation
After a governance incident, replay the period surrounding the incident with strengthened policies to verify that the new policies would have caught the issue.
Compliance Preparation
Before an audit, replay a representative period against your current policies to confirm that governance behavior is consistent and defensible.
Policy Tuning
If a confidence floor policy is holding too many actions, replay with a lower threshold to estimate how many additional actions would be cleared.
WARNING
Replay results are simulated. The replayed verdicts show what would have happened, but they do not change historical records. The original audit trail remains immutable.
Related Features
- Governance Lab -- Test individual simulated actions against policies
- Audit Trail -- The source of historical actions replayed
- Governance Policies -- The policies being tested through replay