From nothing to a recorded change in five minutes.

How it fits together

Reldavi is two halves and it is worth knowing which is which before you install anything. The left of this drawing is code in your repository — three packages and about fifteen lines of configuration. The right runs somewhere else, either on our servers or on yours from the same compose file, and you do not build any of it.

What you need first

1. Install

Two packages: the EF Core interceptor that captures changes, and the client that ships them.

dotnet add package Reldavi.EntityFrameworkCore
dotnet add package Reldavi.Client
dotnet add package Reldavi.AspNetCore

2. Configure

Register the client, attach the interceptor to your DbContext, and add the middleware that tells Reldavi who the current user is. The middleware goes after UseAuthentication, because before it the principal has no claims and every change would be attributed to nobody.

// Program.cs
builder.Services.AddReldaviClient(options =>
{
    options.Endpoint = new Uri("https://ingest.reldavi.com");
    options.ApiKey   = builder.Configuration["Reldavi:ApiKey"]!;
});

builder.Services.AddReldaviEntityFrameworkCore(options =>
{
    options.MaskHashSecret = builder.Configuration["Reldavi:MaskSecret"];
    options.MaskProperty("Iban", MaskStrategy.PreserveLast, 4);
});

builder.Services.AddDbContext<ShopDbContext>((sp, options) => options
    .UseNpgsql(connectionString)
    .UseReldavi(sp));

builder.Services.AddReldaviHttpContext();

var app = builder.Build();

app.UseAuthentication();
app.UseAuthorization();
app.UseReldavi();   // after authentication

What each line does

3. Annotate

By default every entity is audited and every property recorded. Attributes narrow that down. Nothing here changes your business logic.

[AuditResource("shop.order")]
public sealed class Order
{
    public int Id { get; set; }

    [AuditLabel]
    public string Reference { get; set; } = "";

    public string Status { get; set; } = "Pending";

    [AuditMask(MaskStrategy.PreserveLast, 4)]
    public string CardNumber { get; set; } = "";

    [AuditIgnore]
    public string InternalNotes { get; set; } = "";
}

4. Verify

Save a change and open the dashboard. The event appears within a couple of seconds — the default flush interval — and the diff shows only the properties that actually changed.

• The event shows the right actor. If it says "anonymous", the middleware is registered before UseAuthentication.
• Masked properties show their projection. If you see a raw value, the attribute is on the wrong member.
• The reldavi.events.dropped counter is zero. If it is not, the buffer is too small or the endpoint is unhealthy.

What you have after five minutes

One save produces one event per entity it touched. This is what one of them looks like on the wire and in the store — it is worth reading once, because almost every question about the product afterwards is a question about one of these fields.

{
  "id":            "01937f2e-9c14-7a3b-8f21-6d5e4c3b2a19",
  "occurredAt":    "2026-09-21T14:12:08.4419Z",
  "resourceType":  "shop.order",
  "resourceId":    "91847",
  "resourceLabel": "A-1042",
  "action":        "updated",
  "actor": {
    "id":    "u_4410",
    "name":  "deniz@acme.test",
    "type":  "user"
  },
  "changes": {
    "Status":     { "from": "Pending",        "to": "Approved" },
    "Total":      { "from": 1240.00,          "to": 1116.00 },
    "CardNumber": { "from": "•••• •••• •••• 4417", "to": "•••• •••• •••• 9021" }
  }
}

What happens inside one save

Two questions arrive together the first time somebody reads the code: is my transaction slower now, and what happens to the audit event if it rolls back? Both answers are in the order of these four moments.

When your app is not an ASP.NET Core app

AddReldaviHttpContext resolves the tenant and the actor from the current HTTP request. A worker service, a console application or a message consumer has no request, so it tells Reldavi who is acting by pushing a scope instead. Everything else — the interceptor, masking, batching — is identical.

// A worker, a console app, a message consumer: no request, so push a scope.
using (AuditScope.Push(new AuditContext
{
    TenantId = "acme",
    Actor    = AuditActor.Service("nightly-reconciliation"),
}))
{
    order.Status = OrderStatus.Settled;

    await db.SaveChangesAsync(cancellationToken);
}

When nothing appears

Four things account for nearly every empty dashboard, in the order they are worth checking.

The rest of the documentation

The quickstart above ends at a recorded change, which is the beginning rather than the whole of it. Everything the platform does is below, one page per subject.

What to read next

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