Change intent for your whole estate

Every change in your environment, and why it happened.

Other tools tell you what changed. Nakana tells you why: the ticket, the commit, the pipeline run and the person behind each change. When a change has no good reason, you hear about it the same day, not at the audit.

Nakana is Croatian for intent. We're taking a small number of design partners now.

nakana / changes / last 24h4 of 1,284
Deployment payments-api: image v2.14.3 → v2.14.4
k8s / prod-eu-1 / payments · 21:07 Tue
Explained

Why: ships PR #4821 "Retry on upstream 502". Two approvals, built by GitHub Actions, inside the approved window for CHG0031207.

CHG0031207PR #4821actions run 9912argocd sync
GRANT rds_superuser TO svc_reporting
postgres / db-prod-03 · 02:14 Sat
No reason found

Why it's flagged: made with a break-glass account. No ticket, no commit. The DBA who checked out the account has made no privilege grants in 180 days, and has never worked at this hour.

break-glass checkoutoff-hoursfirst privileged grant
sg-0a41e: inbound 0.0.0.0/0 tcp/22 added
aws / prod / eu-west-1 · 16:40 Wed
Partly explained

Why: CHG0031244 allows SSH from the vendor's range, not from anywhere. It was made in the console on a Terraform-managed resource, so the next plan will show drift.

CHG0031244scope mismatchconsole edit
core-sw-02: ACL 110 line 40 permit added
cisco ios-xe / dc-east · 23:12 Thu
Explained

Why: standard change template "Open monitoring port", requested by the NOC on-call, applied by Ansible job 5531.

CHG0031251ansible job 5531

The problem

You can see what changed. Nobody can tell you why.

File integrity monitors, cloud config logs and observability tools record changes by the thousand. Matching each one to a reason is still done by hand: someone exports the change log, opens ServiceNow, opens GitHub, and pieces it together before the auditors arrive.

01 · Audit

Change evidence is a spreadsheet

SOX, PCI DSS and SOC 2 all ask the same thing: was every production change authorized, tested and approved? Today that answer comes from sampling and screenshots.

02 · Security

The risky change looks like every other change

A privileged user granting themselves access at 2 a.m. lands in the same log as 1,200 routine deploys. Without a reason attached to each one, the odd one out doesn't stand out.

03 · Operations

Incidents start with "what changed?"

Most outages follow a change. Responders spend the first hour finding it, then another finding who made it and whether it was meant to happen.

How it works

See the change. Find the reason. Judge the reason.

1 · Observe

Every change, every layer

Read-only API connections and the log platform you already run record changes to code, pipelines, cloud, Kubernetes, hosts, databases and network gear in one format. No agent on your servers.

2 · Attribute

Who, really

Service accounts, shared admin logins and pipelines get traced back to a person, using your identity provider, PAM checkouts and HR directory.

3 · Explain

Why it happened

Nakana links the change to the change request, commit, pull request, pipeline run, deploy or incident that caused it, and writes the reason in plain English.

4 · Judge

Does the reason hold up?

Each change is checked against the ticket's scope and window, the person's normal behavior and your policies. The ones that don't add up get flagged.

Read the full walkthrough and the signals we check →

Coverage

One change record across your whole estate

Intent is only useful if it covers the whole path a change takes, from a developer's laptop to a router config.

Dev environments

Repos, branches, merges, branch protection changes, secrets, developer workstations.

CI/CD

Pipeline runs, workflow edits, artifacts, signatures, deploys and rollbacks.

Production

Releases, feature flags, config pushes and manual hotfixes.

Cloud

AWS, Azure and Google Cloud control-plane changes, IAM, networking and drift from IaC.

Kubernetes

Audit log, workloads, RBAC, admission policies, GitOps syncs and kubectl edits.

Servers and machines

Files, packages, services, users, sudo, kernel modules and registry, via eBPF, auditd and Windows events.

Databases

Schema changes, grants, roles, parameters and direct writes to sensitive tables.

Network devices

Running-config diffs, ACLs, routes and firewall policy on switches, routers and firewalls.

Identity-aware

It knows your people, not just your accounts.

Nakana connects to your identity provider and HR system, the way enterprise search tools read your org chart. So it knows who reports to whom, who is on call, who is on leave, and who normally touches production.

That's what makes a flag worth reading: "a DBA changed a database during a change window" is normal. "A DBA on PTO used a break-glass account to grant superuser at 2 a.m. with no ticket" is not.

Signals we weigh on every change

  • Matches an approved change request, in scope and inside its window
  • Traces to a reviewed commit and a pipeline run, or was made by hand
  • Made at a time and from a place normal for this person
  • First time this person has made this kind of change
  • Made with a break-glass, shared or dormant account
  • Made by hand on a resource managed by Terraform or GitOps
  • Made during a change freeze or an open incident
  • Unusual for this person's team and role
  • Touches a library or host with a CVE on CISA's exploited list

See all signals →

Built for the audit

Change management evidence that writes itself

Every change comes with its reason, approvals and the person who made it. Auditors get a full population, not a sample, and the exceptions list is short because you already dealt with it.

SOX ITGC

Program change and access controls, with every change tied to its approval.

PCI DSS 4.0

Change control (6.5), audit trails (10) and change detection on critical files (11.5).

SOC 2

CC8.1 change management and CC7 monitoring, evidenced continuously.

ISO 27001, DORA, NIS2

Change management and ICT risk evidence for EU and international frameworks.

How Nakana maps to each framework →

Works with what you run

Bring your change tickets, your logs and your pipelines.

ServiceNow, Jira, GitHub, GitLab, Datadog, Splunk, AWS, Kubernetes, Okta, Entra ID and more than 150 other sources. Nakana adds the reason to data you already collect, and pulls vulnerability context from the scanners you already run.

Browse integrations

How we're different

They record the change. We explain it.

Integrity monitors, cloud posture tools and change-tracking features in observability platforms are good at telling you something changed. Few check it against a ticket, and none tells you whether the reason holds up.

Compare approaches

Early access

Tell us how you track change today.

We're looking for a few design partners in regulated industries: financial services, healthcare, payments and SaaS with SOC 2 or SOX scope. Partners shape which integrations ship first.