Introduction

Provenance is a tracking and analytics platform that records, analyzes, and acts on resource interactions across distributed systems. It combines data lineage tracking, event-driven notifications, real-time analytics, and customizable alerting into a single API.

What it does

Every time something happens in your system — a user signs up, an order ships, a deployment completes — Provenance records it as an interaction. Each interaction captures:

• What resource was affected (resourceId)
• What type of resource it is (resourceType)
• What action was performed (action)
• Where it originated from (origin)
• When it occurred (createdDate, or a custom interactionTimestamp)
• Who performed it (userId)
• Additional context as freeform JSON (interaction)
• Unit of Work ID for correlating related events across services (uowId)

Why it matters

In distributed systems, understanding what happened, when, and why is hard. Logs are scattered across services. Events are fire-and-forget. Audit trails are an afterthought.

Provenance gives you a single source of truth for every interaction across every service, with built-in:

• Search — Find any interaction by resource, action, origin, user, or time range
• Traces — Follow a resource through every service that touched it
• Analytics — Build dashboards with bar, line, pie, stat, and table widgets
• Notifications — Subscribe to events and get notified via email, Slack, webhooks, AWS Lambda, and 10+ other adapters
• Alerts — Set thresholds and get alerted when patterns change

How it works

Your Services ──→ Provenance API ──→ Your Tenant Database
                       │
                       ├──→ Analytics Engine
                       │
                       └──→ Subscription Engine
                                │
                                ├──→ Email (SendGrid)
                                ├──→ Slack
                                ├──→ Webhooks
                                ├──→ AWS Lambda / SNS / SQS
                                ├──→ PagerDuty
                                ├──→ Microsoft Teams
                                └──→ Custom adapters

When you sign up, Provenance provisions an isolated tenant with its own database schema. All your data is completely separated from other tenants. You interact with the API using your API key — every request is routed to your tenant automatically.

Authentication

All API requests require your API key in the x-api-key header:

curl -H "x-api-key: your-api-key" https://provenance.onrender.com/api/actions

You receive your first API key when you sign up. You can create additional keys and revoke them from the platform dashboard.

Plans

All plans include the full API, CLI, SDK, and MCP access. No credit card required to start.

Next steps

• Quick Start — Sign up and record your first interaction in 2 minutes
• Configuration — API base URL, authentication, and rate limits
• First Interaction — Detailed walkthrough of the interaction model