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Authority Graph

The Authority Graph is the governance view for a business service. It shows everything that determines whether an agent is authorised to act on a decision surface, and what happens when authority is missing.

Overview

The Authority Graph is built from seven node kinds:

  • Business service — the root.
  • Decision surface — a named decision boundary on the service.
  • Authority profile — confidence / consequence thresholds and fail-mode for one surface.
  • Authority grant — attaches an agent to a profile.
  • Agent — the runtime actor that executes a granted profile.
  • Fail-mode policy — the rules applied when authority is unavailable or unclear.
  • Escalation target — the recipient of escalation when a profile fails.

Edges encode covers, grants, applies, escalates to and similar authority relationships.

The projection is deterministic and read-only. Nothing in the Explorer mutates governance records.

Diagnostics

The Diagnostics tab in the right drawer lists the projection's diagnostic records. Each entry has:

  • A severity (info, warning, critical).
  • A diagnostic kind (e.g. surface_missing_profile, grant_without_agent, dangling_escalation_target).
  • A human-readable message.
  • One or more node refs (kind + id) the diagnostic applies to.

Critical and warning diagnostics typically point to gaps in authority coverage. Info diagnostics are advisory.

Posture

The Posture & Help tab in the right drawer shows the surface posture for any decision surface in the projection. Each row of the posture table summarises one surface across six axes:

  • authority_status — complete, incomplete, degraded, uncovered.
  • profile_status — does the surface have an active authority profile?
  • grant_status — is there an active grant attached to that profile?
  • agent_status — is the grant attached to a known agent?
  • fail_mode_policy_status — is an effective fail-mode policy in place?
  • escalation_status — is the profile's escalation target wired up?

A surface in complete posture has all six axes resolved. Anything else is worth investigating.

Business service

The business service is the root of the Authority Graph. It is the service-level container that owns the decision surfaces, holds an owner, and references the default fail-mode policy via fail_mode_policy_id.

Inspector fields: status, owner, service_type, external_ref. Technical fields: fail_mode_policy_id.

Decision surface

A decision surface is a named boundary on a business service where an authority decision must be taken (e.g. "approve transaction", "publish content"). Each surface has at most one effective authority profile and one effective fail-mode policy at a time.

Inspector fields: status, process_id, effective_policy_source, effective_policy_id, inherits_bs_policy. Technical fields: version, business_service_id.

effective_policy_source is override when the surface specifies its own fail-mode policy, inherited when it falls back to the business service's default, and none when no policy applies.

Authority profile

An authority profile describes the thresholds and fail-mode that govern a decision surface. It carries confidence / consequence thresholds and an escalation target.

Inspector fields: status, surface_id, escalation_target_id, fail_mode. Technical fields: version, validity_status, confidence_threshold, consequence_threshold, escalation_mode.

A surface with no active authority profile is in incomplete posture for the profile_status axis.

Authority grant

An authority grant attaches an agent to an authority profile. It can add capability overrides or constraint overrides; it does not redefine the profile itself.

Inspector fields: status, agent_id, capabilities. Technical fields: profile_id, validity_status, constraints.

A grant without a known agent surfaces a grant_without_agent diagnostic.

Agent

An agent is the runtime actor (a model deployment, a service account, a named system) that executes the granted profile on a decision surface. Agents carry an operational state and an owner.

Inspector fields: operational_state, type, owner. Technical fields: model_version.

An agent with operational_state other than active is worth checking; it typically points at a deployment-side issue, not an authority gap.

Fail-mode policy

A fail-mode policy is the set of rules MIDAS applies when authority is unavailable or unclear at evaluation time. Policies are versioned and have an effective window. The rule_count_by_class field counts the rules of each class the policy carries.

Inspector fields: status, effective_date, business_owner, technical_owner. Technical fields: version, effective_until, origin, managed, rule_count_by_class.

A surface without an effective_policy_id and no inherited business-service policy is in incomplete posture for the fail_mode_policy_status axis.