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

Source: Dev.to | Jan 14, 2026 (UTC)

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.