Audit mode

Audit mode is what ultrarouter does the moment you point an OpenAI-compatible client at it with only the base URL and API key changed. It is passive: no model switch, no provider change, no config edit, no retention upgrade. It quietly learns what your calls are trying to do and produces a readiness report — and nothing about how your requests are served changes.

This is the passive subset of the zero-configuration Audit Autopilot. The full lifecycle (evaluator building, benchmarking, recommendations, canary, verified) is covered under evals and rolls out on top of what audit observes.

What you get with zero configuration

Send ordinary traffic — no call_type, no ur.* fields, no Bench headers — and the audit builds:

• Inferred call types with a confidence level and evidence coverage. Stable request shapes are fingerprinted; once enough similar requests accumulate, a call type surfaces on its own. Below that threshold they appear as emerging shapes.
• An inventory of the models, providers and key modes it has seen.
• A benchmark-readiness map that says plainly what evidence is unavailable and why under your current privacy settings — rather than retaining request bodies secretly.
• A discovery savings queue — cheaper candidate models shortlisted by list price, ranked by spend. These are discovery estimates only. They are never a savings claim and are never applied automatically.

Read it at GET /v1/audit/readiness or on the Audit screen in the dashboard.

The observing state

Each call type carries a lifecycle state. In audit mode every call type is born observing — the entry into that state is recorded with an evidence reason (it either emerged from explicit use or crossed the auto-inference threshold). No state in audit mode influences routing or config: audit has zero authority.

Honest evidence, honest money

Audit never labels an estimate as measured. Cost evidence is only replayable (provider-reported) for a call type when a durable, consented capture exists for it; otherwise it is estimate-only, and the report says so. Every savings figure in audit mode is a discovery estimate, kept strictly separate from the realized savings ledger.

Privacy: nothing is retained without consent

Audit honors your existing payload-retention setting. Under the default metadata retention, request and response bodies are never stored, so replay-grade benchmarking is unavailable — the report names that gap instead of quietly keeping bodies. To bound volume, no-consent shape metadata is deterministically sampled (a stable hash of the request id — never random), and the sampling is shown in the report's coverage, not hidden.

To unlock replay-grade evidence for a workload, enable full payload retention or a Bench suite. Neither is required to start: the base-URL/key swap is enough.

Failure behavior

Analysis runs off the request path. If it fails, your request is unaffected and the failure becomes an actionable diagnostic — audit fails open for serving and closed for optimization. It can surface an exploration hint; it can never change how a request is served.