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Quickstart: from connector to verified event

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The shortest path from a signed-in account to a cryptographically verified record. Slack is the fastest connector to set up, so this walkthrough uses it, but any of the five gets you to the same place.

Before you start#

  • A Governax account that has been approved. If you are looking at a pending screen, see Why a new workspace starts pending.
  • Administrator rights in the tool you are connecting. For Slack that means being able to authorise an app for the workspace.

Connect a tool and verify an event#

  1. Open an entity

    Signing in drops you on an entity dashboard. The left rail lists the entity's surfaces, including Ledger and Integrations. If your organisation has several entities, use the switcher at the top to pick the one this tool belongs to. A connector attaches to exactly one entity, and its events land only in that entity's ledger.

  2. Connect Slack

    Go to Integrations and choose Slack. You are sent to Slack to authorise the app, then returned to Governax. Full detail on the scopes requested is in Slack.

  3. Watch the baseline arrive

    On connect, Governax takes a snapshot of current access rather than waiting for the next change. For Slack that is the workspace roster and channel membership. Open the Ledger and you should see those entries within a few seconds. This snapshot is what gives you a starting position to compare against.

  4. Open one event

    Click any row. The detail panel shows the normalised event and a cryptographic proof block carrying the event's own hash and the hash of the event before it. The proof is recomputed when you open the page and compared against what is stored, so a mismatch would show here.

  5. Verify the whole chain

    Use Verify integrity on the Ledger page. Governax re-walks every event in the entity, recomputes each hash, and checks each link. The result is verified, broken or failed, with a signed receipt. On a fresh ledger this takes moments. See Verifying the ledger for what the receipt does and does not prove.

What an event looks like#

Every connector normalises into the same shape, so a Slack event and an AWS event differ in their payload but not in their structure:

{
  "id": "8f14e45f-ea2b-4c2f-9f1e-1d6a3b0c7e21",
  "entity_seq": 42,
  "source_tool": "slack",
  "event_type": "access.channel_member_added",
  "actor": { "external_id": "U01ABCDEF", "email": "[email protected]" },
  "subject": { "external_id": "U07GHIJKL", "email": "[email protected]" },
  "payload": { "channel_id": "C02XYZ", "channel_name": "finance-private" },
  "occurred_at": "2026-08-03T09:14:22.000Z",
  "ingested_at": "2026-08-03T09:14:23.481Z",
  "source_event_id": "Ev07ABCDEF",
  "prev_hash": "4b227777d4dd1fc61c6f884f48641d02b4d121d3fd328cb08b5531fcacdabf8a",
  "row_hash": "ef2d127de37b942baad06145e54b0c619a1f22327b2ebbcfbec78f5564afe39d"
}

entity_seq is this event's position in its entity's chain, assigned by the database. Field-by-field detail is in Anatomy of a governance event.

If nothing arrives#

  • Check the connector tile. Integrations shows the status of each connection along with the time of the last event and the last error, if there was one.
  • Check which entity you are looking at. Connecting a tool to one entity and then reading a different entity's ledger is the most common cause of an empty screen.
  • Give polled connectors time. Google Workspace and AWS are polled every ten minutes, and the underlying audit logs have their own delivery delay on top of that.
  • Make a change worth recording. After the baseline snapshot, the ledger only moves when access or configuration actually changes. Ordinary activity in the tool is not recorded.