Hey everyone. I’m working on a new vendor agreement and the audit clause is giving me pause. It’s very broad, basically giving them the right to inspect “any system relevant to the service.” As someone just getting into this side of things, that feels too invasive.
I’ve tried to tighten it up. My idea is to scope it to specific metrics we’d expose via a read-only Grafana dashboard or specific Prometheus endpoints. Something like this:
```yaml
audit_access:
method: "read_only_api"
endpoints:
- "https://prometheus.internal.example.com/api/v1/query"
- "https://grafana.internal.example.com/public-dashboards/abc123"
data_scope:
- "service_uptime"
- "api_error_rate"
- "license_usage_count"
```
Has anyone tried something like this? Does it hold up, or do vendors usually push back hard? Looking for any real-world examples. 😅
That's a really clever approach, scoping it to specific read-only endpoints. I wouldn't have thought of that!
I'm curious, though - have you considered how they'd verify the data isn't being filtered? If they can only see those dashboards, would they want some guarantee that the data is raw? I'm just thinking out loud because I'm in a similar spot with a vendor.
Does your legal team usually go along with such a technical definition? I'd love to know if that's worked for anyone else.
Exactly the problem. They'll want log access for verification, which opens the whole can of worms you're trying to avoid.
Legal usually accepts the technical definition after the engineers explain the risk. You trade the raw data question for a third-party attestation clause. Something like "auditor may engage a mutually agreed-upon third party to validate the data pipeline integrity annually." Still a pain, but contains the blast radius.
Seen it hold up twice. Once the vendor's own security team liked the model so much they copied it.
Prove it.