---
title: "Questions and answers: 54 across 7 categories"
canonical_url: "https://tokenobserve.com/faq"
published: 2026-09-02
last_updated: 2026-10-15
---

# Questions and answers: 54 across 7 categories

The questions are split by category rather than held on one page, because a very large answer set is truncated from the bottom by whatever consumes it, and because a page that puts what is this next to what happens when the gateway is down gives a retriever no usable chunk boundary. Each category below is its own page, carrying its own FAQPage node.

- What Token Observe is (https://tokenobserve.com/faq/what-it-is): What the product does, who it suits, its current stage, that it has no reference customers yet, and the limits of a pilot. 12 questions.
- Licence, pricing and support (https://tokenobserve.com/faq/commercial): The source-available licence, how the product is metered, the free 30-day trial, the support model, what procurement needs on data processing, and how your records leave if you stop. 6 questions.
- Deployment and operations (https://tokenobserve.com/faq/deployment): What it runs on, how long onboarding takes, backup and restore, upgrades and rollback, air-gapped installs, and why there is no high-availability topology. 7 questions.
- Security and threat model (https://tokenobserve.com/faq/security): The threat model, key custody, injection and redaction limits, whether the audit log can be rewritten, vulnerability disclosure, and what has not been tested. 10 questions.
- Compliance and evidence (https://tokenobserve.com/faq/compliance): EU AI Act, ISO/IEC 42001, NIST AI RMF and OWASP mappings, what an evidence export proves, retention and erasure, and which certifications do not exist. 6 questions.
- How it works (https://tokenobserve.com/faq/how-it-works): The request path step by step: how an agent is onboarded, what happens inline, what streaming and failover do, what happens when something is unavailable, and what you do when a policy blocks work it should not have. 8 questions.
- Alternatives and adjacent tools (https://tokenobserve.com/faq/alternatives): Where Token Observe sits against gateways, observability, security platforms and identity products, and the case for and against building it yourself. 5 questions.