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Inspector Mode

For admins

Inspector Mode lets you give an external auditor, inspector or reviewer a window into Keystone that is read-only and time-limited, with every page they open recorded — so they can see the evidence for themselves without any risk of a change being made, and you keep a defensible record of what they looked at.

Find it under Admin → People & access → Inspector sessions (served at /admin/inspector-sessions).

Granting and revoking sessions is gated on platform::inspector::manage, typically held by the trust admin or head of IT. Every grant and revoke writes a tamper-signed audit row.

  1. Pick an existing Keystone user to be the inspector. They must already have an account — Inspector Mode doesn’t mint guest credentials, so your existing identity controls (SSO, MFA, password policy) still apply to them.
  2. Give the session a purpose — what the visit is for.
  3. Set an expiry. The session is active from the moment it’s granted until then.

While a user has an active inspector session for the workspace:

  • Every non-GET request is blocked with a 403 — defence in depth, so even if their role somehow carried a write permission, the action is still rejected at the HTTP layer.
  • A banner is shown on every page, telling them that Inspector Mode is read-only and that the views they take are logged.

Sensitive-record views are captured in the access log as usual, so afterwards an admin can reconstruct exactly what the inspector saw and when.

A session auto-releases at its expiry — no action needed. To end one early, revoke it, optionally recording a reason. A revoked session can’t be reactivated; grant a fresh one if access is needed again.