Why KeepRails

KeepRails vs a manual audit

A human reviewing configs by hand catches nuance — but not repeatably and not at fleet scale. KeepRails makes evidence collection deterministic.

Run a free scan Understand the category

Short answer

A manual audit is defensible once. KeepRails is defensible every month, with the boundary written down and the method versioned.

vs mcp-scan vs Semgrep vs a manual audit Why not OpenTelemetry

Where a manual audit wins

Judgement calls about intent and business contextReading a policy and deciding whether practice matches itInterviewing people about how they actually work

Where KeepRails wins

Producing the same artifact again next quarter, reproduciblyCovering every enrolled machine instead of a sampleEmitting machine-readable evidence you can diffDeclaring what was not scanned instead of leaving a blank

Side by side

Dimensiona manual auditKeepRails

Repeatability Varies by reviewer and by day Deterministic — same inputs, same evidence output, recorded rubric + KB version

Evidence trail Depends on reviewer notes Dated, source-attributed register with an integrity hash

Coverage Whatever the reviewer remembers to check Declared endpoint collectors with explicit not-scanned boundaries

Fixes Hand edits, easy to get wrong Previewed, backed up, applied atomically, reversible

Effort Hours of a senior engineer's time One command, seconds

A careful human audit catches things automation misses — intent, context, the judgement call about whether a tool earns its keep. KeepRails does not try to remove that judgement; it removes the toil around it.

Running the audit by hand means it happens rarely, differs every time, and rests on whoever is doing it remembering the whole surface. KeepRails runs the same deterministic pass in seconds and turns the result into a dated evidence register — so the human spends their judgement on the decisions, not on enumerating configs.

Use both — that is the honest recommendation

The register becomes the input your assessor reviews, instead of the spreadsheet they distrust. Keep the human judgement; stop hand-collecting the inventory.

curl -fsSL https://staging.keeprails.dev/install.sh | sh