Evidence labels

Every statement Provenant shows during an investigation carries one of four labels, so you can tell at a glance what is verified and what is still a theory.

Label	Meaning
Fact	Established directly by cited evidence from a tool result, such as a deployment record or a deterministic count.
Observation	Something seen in live signals — an error spike, a queue backlog — linked to the query that showed it.
Hypothesis	A candidate explanation, scored on the evidence that supports and contradicts it.
Recommendation	A suggested next step. Changes to your systems run only as named, parameter-validated actions after explicit human approval.

Why the labels matter

• Competing hypotheses are ranked on evidence, and the final RCA separates facts from hypotheses and states its confidence.
• A hypothesis never becomes a fact on its own: it needs supporting evidence and, for the root cause, an engineer’s confirmation.
• Numbers shown as facts — transactions, affected customers, time windows — are counted, not generated by a model.

Next: Anatomy of an RCA.