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They tell you what changed. Nakana tells you why, and whether the why holds up.
Plenty of good tools detect change. Each covers a slice of the estate and answers a different question. Here's where they stop and where Nakana starts.
At a glance
Six questions every change should answer
| Approach | Sees change across every layer | Matches change tickets | Traces to commit and pipeline | Knows the person (IdP, HR, PAM) | Baselines normal behavior | Judges if the reason holds up |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Nakana | Yes | Yes | Yes | Yes | Yes | Yes |
| File integrity monitoring and closed-loop change control | Hosts, network, DB | Yes | No | No | No | Planned vs unplanned |
| Directory and Windows change auditing | AD, M365, file servers | No | No | Directory only | Some UBA | No |
| Cloud security and detection (CNAPP, CDR, runtime) | Cloud, K8s, hosts | No | No | Cloud identities | Yes | Threats only |
| Cloud-native config history | One cloud | No | No | Who, not why | No | No |
| IaC drift detection | IaC-managed resources | No | For IaC | No | No | Drift cause |
| Observability and AIOps change tracking | Services, deploys, flags | To find incident causes | Deploys | No | No | Incident cause only |
| Software delivery compliance | Pipeline and runtime | Process evidence | Yes | No | No | Process followed |
| ITSM unauthorized-change detection | Mapped CIs only | Yes | No | Assignee only | No | No |
Based on public product documentation, reviewed October 2026. Vendors change fast; if we've got yours wrong, email [email protected] and we'll fix it.
By category
What each kind of tool is built for
Nakana is not a replacement for most of these. It reads what they already record and adds the reason.
Fortra Tripwire, Netwrix Change Tracker, Cimcor CimTrak, Qualys FIM
Strong at detecting file, registry and config changes on servers and network devices, and the most mature at matching them to approved tickets. They don't follow a change back through Git and CI/CD, and they don't know whether the person who made it normally works that way.
With Nakana: keep them for host-level integrity; Nakana adds lineage, identity and behavior across cloud, Kubernetes and code.
Netwrix Auditor, Lepide, ManageEngine ADAudit Plus
Who did what, when and where in Active Directory, Microsoft 365, file servers and SQL Server. Some behavior analytics. They don't check changes against tickets or code, and they don't cover cloud or pipelines.
With Nakana: their audit trail becomes one more source of who-did-what.
Wiz, Orca Security, Sysdig, Falco
Behavioral baselines and threat detection on cloud audit logs, Kubernetes and runtime. Built to catch attackers, not to ask whether a change was requested, approved and deployed the right way.
With Nakana: their detections become context; an "explained" change from a known pipeline rarely needs a SOC analyst.
AWS Config and CloudTrail, Azure Activity Log, Google Cloud Audit Logs
A precise record of each resource change and the identity that made it. One cloud at a time, and no reason attached.
With Nakana: these are core inputs. Nakana reads them, it doesn't replace them.
Firefly, env0, Spacelift
Find resources that drifted from Terraform or were changed by hand in the console, and in some cases suggest the cause. Limited to infrastructure that's managed as code.
With Nakana: drift becomes one signal among many, tied to a ticket and a person.
Datadog Change Tracking, Dynatrace, PagerDuty, BigPanda, Komodor
Put deploys, config and flag changes on a service timeline so responders can find the change that caused an incident. Excellent for reliability. They don't decide whether a change was legitimate.
With Nakana: Nakana pulls their change events and logs, and sends verdicts back as events.
Kosli
Records evidence that software went through the required pipeline steps and flags workloads that didn't. Focused on the delivery path; doesn't cover hosts, databases, network gear or hand changes by admins.
With Nakana: delivery evidence is one link in the chain; Nakana covers everything outside the pipeline too.
OpenSSF Scorecard and Allstar, Apiiro, Legit Security
Check repositories for risky settings and code changes: branch protection, code review, dangerous workflows, pinned dependencies, signed releases. They grade the repo; they don't follow the change into production.
With Nakana: repo checks feed the lineage signals, such as "branch protection turned off around this merge".
ServiceNow Change Management and Discovery
Can open an "unauthorized change" when Discovery sees a CI change without an approved request. Covers only configuration items in mapped services, and only what Discovery can see.
With Nakana: ServiceNow stays the system of record. Nakana writes verdicts and evidence back to the change request.
The difference
A ticket match isn't a reason.
A change can match an approved ticket and still be wrong: the ticket covered one firewall rule and three were changed, the approver also made the change, or the change was made by hand on a resource Terraform owns. Nakana checks the whole chain, ticket, code, pipeline and person, and tells you which link is weak.
Already running one of these?
Good. Nakana works best on top of the data you already collect. Tell us what you run and we'll tell you what Nakana would add.