---
title: "The platform: 15 capabilities behind one decision point"
canonical_url: "https://tokenobserve.com/platform"
published: 2026-09-02
last_updated: 2026-10-21
---

# The platform: 15 capabilities behind one decision point

## How the capabilities are grouped, and why in this order

The order is the order a buyer's questions arrive in, which is not the order the engineering documentation uses: what exists and who owns it, then what enforcement means, then what it cost, then prove it, then the surfaces past the model call where most agent risk sits.

### Spend

Track connected provider-account costs and the AI subscriptions and API accounts you register.

- AI spend and subscriptions (https://tokenobserve.com/platform/estate-spend): What you were billed and what you were metered, recorded as two numbers and never added into one.
- Endpoint seats (https://tokenobserve.com/platform/endpoint-seats): Policy enforced inside each vendor’s own administrator hook, decided offline against a signed bundle, because a hook that phones home fails open.
- Spend controls (https://tokenobserve.com/platform/spend-controls): Hard USD ceilings, per-minute rate limits and a kill switch, all decided before the request leaves your network.

### Activity

Follow requests routed through your workspace. Bounded, redacted text capture is off by default.

- AI conversation evidence (https://tokenobserve.com/platform/conversation-evidence): What the AI was asked and what it returned, redacted before it is stored and bounded before it is kept.
- Flight recorder (https://tokenobserve.com/platform/flight-recorder): Every governed request in a timeline a compliance officer can read, and a search box that never writes SQL.
- Audit chain (https://tokenobserve.com/platform/audit-chain): Every administrative act hash-chained, and anchored with a signature your auditor can check alone.
- Model routing (https://tokenobserve.com/platform/model-routing): Six upstreams behind one set of policies, and a fallback chain that will not launder a refusal.

### Access

Record tool approvals and govern permissions and budgets for agents you connect.

- Approved and unauthorised AI (https://tokenobserve.com/platform/approved-ai): Approved, prohibited or unknown, so the subscriptions you already pay for stop arriving in the seat-spend report.
- Shadow AI radar (https://tokenobserve.com/platform/shadow-ai-radar): Five evidence sources for AI activity that never touched the gateway, and a coverage model that refuses to call a dead feed a clean estate.
- Agent registry (https://tokenobserve.com/platform/agent-registry): One record per agent, and it is the record the gateway enforces against.
- Agent permissions (https://tokenobserve.com/platform/agent-permissions): Deny by default, explicit deny wins, and delegation intersects, so an agent cannot borrow authority it was never granted.
- Policy engine (https://tokenobserve.com/platform/policy-engine): One deterministic verdict on every governed request: allow, block, redact, or park it for a human.
- Human approvals (https://tokenobserve.com/platform/human-approvals): One human decision, bound to one exact payload, spendable once.
- MCP gateway (https://tokenobserve.com/platform/mcp-gateway): The half of an agent that moves money is a tool call, not a sentence. This is the checkpoint that call goes through.
- Effect contracts (https://tokenobserve.com/platform/effect-contracts): The action leaves once, and success is what a second pinned tool observed.