Telemetry integrity

Definition

Telemetry integrity is the property of an observation record that its contents are what they claim to be: observations actually taken, windows that the stored data can fill, labels that match the underlying sample, and enough disclosed provenance - count, window bounds, probe interval, origin - for a reader to check the arithmetic.

The problem

Incident attribution depends on the completeness of a record as much as on its accuracy. An incomplete record does not merely miss failures; it makes absences ambiguous, so "no failures were recorded" and "no measurements were taken" become indistinguishable.

Why it matters

An attacker who can suppress measurements achieves the same evidentiary effect as one who can falsify them, at lower cost and with less detectability. Publishing the denominator is what closes that ambiguity, which makes telemetry integrity a security property and not only a data-quality one.

Practical example

A 90-day availability figure computed over 2.1 days of observations is arithmetically correct and evidentially thin. Both properties have to be visible in the record, or a reader - or a retrieval system quoting the page - cannot tell which one they are looking at.

How RELIASTRA approaches it

Observations are written with their origin and timestamp, never backfilled, and pruned by scheduled jobs rather than silently truncated. Evidence reports are checksummed and bound to the organisation that produced them. Where the public record falls short of this standard, RELIASTRA publishes the audit that found it.