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Hello Cerbi
Hello Cerbi

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Cerbi Update: Practical Logging Governance That Actually Runs in Your Tenant

I’ve been heads-down building Cerbi, a logging governance layer for teams that are tired of discovering logging problems after production data is already on fire.

Cerbi isn’t a new log platform. It doesn’t replace Serilog, NLog, OpenTelemetry, or your existing sinks. It sits next to your logger and answers a very specific question:

“Are we logging the right things, the right way, without leaking data or creating chaos?”

What Cerbi Is (and isn’t)

Cerbi is a governance and enforcement layer for structured logging.

It gives you:

  • Compile-time validation (Roslyn analyzers)
  • Runtime validation (non-blocking, tag-and-score)
  • Centralized governance rules (JSON, versioned, deployable)
  • Per-tenant deployment (your infra, your data, your control)

It does not:

  • Proxy or ingest your logs
  • Phone home from the hot path
  • Charge per GB
  • Require replacing your existing logging stack

If your logs already go to queues, files, or sinks, Cerbi stays out of the way.

What’s working today

This isn’t a roadmap post — this is what exists and runs:

CerbiStream

  • Structured logging with built-in governance hooks
  • Async logging with backpressure handling
  • File fallback (including encrypted rotation)
  • Zero network dependency in the hot path

Governance Analyzer (compile-time)

  • Enforces required fields, forbidden fields, enums, encryption rules
  • Works in IDE + CI
  • Same JSON schema used everywhere (no drift)

Runtime Governance

  • Mirrors analyzer rules at runtime
  • Never drops logs
  • Redacts sensitive values and tags violations instead
  • Supports Relax() scopes (explicit, auditable rule bypass)

CerbiShield (Dashboard + APIs)

  • JSON governance profiles with versioning
  • RBAC, audit logs, and deployment history
  • Per-tenant deployment (Azure Container Apps right now)
  • Governance rules deploy to GitHub, filesystem, pipelines, etc.

Everything runs in the customer’s tenant. The only thing hosted centrally (later) is optional scoring and analytics.

Why I built this

Every enterprise team I’ve worked with eventually hits the same problems:

  • Logging standards exist… somewhere
  • Nobody enforces them consistently
  • PII sneaks into logs anyway
  • Cleanup happens after incidents
  • Governance lives in Confluence instead of code

Cerbi treats logging rules like code:

  • Defined once
  • Versioned
  • Validated early
  • Enforced continuously

No policy theater.

Current status

  • Core runtime + analyzers: stable
  • Dashboard + APIs: feature-complete for Phase 1
  • Marketplace prep: in progress
  • Multi-language logger plugins (Node / Python / Java / Go): next

CerbiStream and the analyzers are free. CerbiShield (the governance control plane) is the licensed piece.

If this sounds useful

I’m actively looking for:

  • Teams who care about logging quality and compliance
  • People who want to try governance without ripping out their stack
  • Feedback from folks who’ve been burned by log sprawl before

Docs and repos are public, and I’m sharing progress openly as this hardens.

Logging shouldn’t be exciting — but broken logging is always exciting in the worst possible way. Cerbi is about making the boring parts correct, predictable, and enforced.

More updates soon.

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