Compliance Archive
A daily, write-once archive of your audit trail and release evidence in immutable storage you own, kept for seven years.
What it is
Compliance Archive copies your organization’s audit trail and release evidence, one full day at a time, into an immutable storage container that you own and control. Each day’s archive is written the following day, and the retention sold with the add-on is seven years.
The point of the feature is that an auditor can be shown the period rather than told about it. Instead of asking the vendor to attest that a record exists and was never altered, you hand the auditor a container in your own cloud account, with your own immutability policy on it, and let them look. An archive a vendor can delete is not evidence.
This is deliberately not a backup. Nothing here is meant to be restored from. It is a durable, tamper-evident record of what happened and who approved it.
Compliance Archive is not part of any base plan. It is a separate add-on with its own monthly price, and it can only be enabled on a plan whose base tier already keeps audit events indefinitely — in practice, the Enterprise plan. On a lower plan, audit events expire on their own schedule, so archiving them would be preserving something the live log has already dropped. On an eligible plan that has not turned it on yet, the screen shows the option to enable it along with the monthly price. Enabling it is a billing commitment, not just a feature switch.
Disabling is always allowed, whatever your plan. Turning it off stops the daily run and stops the charge. It does not touch, move, or delete anything already archived — that content is in your storage account and stays there.
Setting up the archive
Once the add-on is enabled, you point it at a destination. The configuration is entirely separate from Disaster Recovery, even though the two screens follow the same shape.
- Daily archive toggle - turns the scheduled run on and off. Pausing keeps the destination configured; when you resume, the archive picks back up from the last day it successfully wrote, so a pause does not leave a hole in the record.
- Container SAS URL - a shared access signature for the storage container that will hold the archive. It needs create permission on that container, and the container should already have an immutability policy applied by you.
- Path prefix - optional. Set one when a single container serves more than one organization, so each organization’s archive lands under its own path.
Save stores the destination. After that, the SAS URL is shown only as a masked placeholder: the screen never displays the real value again, and the mask does not reveal how long it was. To change the destination, enter a new URL and save again.
Status and on-demand runs
The status panel tells you whether the archive is actually working, without you having to go look in the storage account:
| Field | What it tells you |
|---|---|
| Destination | A masked preview of the configured container. The signature token is never shown. |
| Retention | The retention in years recorded for the add-on. |
| Last archived day | The most recent day whose audit events and release evidence were written successfully. |
| Last succeeded / last attempted | When a run last completed, and when one was last tried. A gap between the two means the recent attempts are failing. |
| Last error | The most recent failure, if there was one. |
A failed run surfaces here as status, not as an error thrown at you elsewhere in the app. That means nobody is interrupted by it, and it also means nobody finds out unless someone looks — so check this panel periodically rather than assuming silence is success.
Run archive now triggers an on-demand run immediately. Use it right after you save a destination: it proves the SAS URL and permissions are correct there and then, instead of leaving you to discover a typo when the first scheduled day quietly fails overnight.
Immutability and retention
The immutability guarantee comes from your storage account, not from this application. The app records the retention period sold with the add-on and writes each day’s archive once, but the actual “this cannot be deleted, even deliberately” property is enforced by the immutability policy you configure on your own container.
If you point the archive at an ordinary container with no immutability policy, you get a daily copy of your audit trail and nothing more — the write-once property that makes it usable as evidence simply is not there. Configure the policy on the container first, then save the destination.
For the same reason, there is no download button and no legal-hold button on this screen. The archive already lives in your own container. Retrieving it, granting an auditor access to it, and placing a legal hold on it are all done through that storage account directly, with the tools and permissions your organization already uses there.
How this relates to other features
Compliance Archive is easy to confuse with two neighboring features. The distinctions matter, because they are for different jobs.
| What it holds | Where it goes | What it is for | |
|---|---|---|---|
| Disaster Recovery | Your authoring content: projects, rulesets, and the rest of what you build. | Ordinary storage. | Restoring, if something goes wrong. |
| Audit Log | The live record of changes to rules, releases, access, and credentials. | Inside the app. | Browsing and filtering what happened, right now. |
| Compliance Archive | Audit events plus release evidence. | Immutable storage you own. | Long-term proof an auditor can verify independently. |
Put plainly: Disaster Recovery exists to be restored from, and Compliance Archive exists never to be restored from. One is a backup, the other is proof. And where the Audit Log is the live, queryable record you read in the app, Compliance Archive is a durable copy of that same audit data — along with release evidence — pushed out to storage under your control, where its retention no longer depends on us.