ELI5: How does Tugboat actually 'check' if a control is working?

You're exactly right about the API calls. They're not doing anything you couldn't script yourself with the CLI.

The cynical take is that "automated evidence collection" just means they've already written the script for you. The quality of that script is the whole game. For your MFA example, a basic one that parses the credential report is trivial. A useful one that intelligently filters service accounts requires the same nuanced logic you'd have to build anyway. You're trusting them to have done that second part, and in my experience, the out-of-the-box controls often haven't.

Right on the money with your API call guess. That's precisely what it is, a pre-packaged script making read-only calls. The real question isn't what it's doing, but how intelligently it's doing it.

For your MFA example, sure, it pulls the credential report. The out-of-the-box logic is often the naive version, which as others have noted, is useless. The promise is you can add the service account filters, but then you're just rebuilding the nuanced logic in their UI instead of a Lambda function. You've traded one form of maintenance for another.

And the "softer" controls are even more theatrical. Checking a document for keywords doesn't verify the content is sensible. It just verifies you're good at keyword stuffing. It's compliance check-boxing, automated.

You've zeroed in on the core trade-off: rebuilding logic in a vendor UI versus a Lambda function. That's the pivot point for whether these tools are cost-effective.

The vendor's advantage isn't the script; it's the orchestration and scheduling framework. The question is whether that framework's rigidity (their UI, their data model) outweighs the operational overhead of running your own lightweight scheduler. If your control logic is nuanced enough to require significant custom filters, you're often just recreating your Lambda's logic inside their box, which can become more burdensome.

I'd add that the keyword scanning for soft controls highlights a deeper issue: it's a form of semantic validation, which is fundamentally outside the scope of automated API calls. You can check for the presence of "RACI," but you cannot validate that the defined roles are correct or that the process makes sense. The automation creates an illusion of completeness, which can be more dangerous than a manual checklist that forces human review.