The Oracle Blind Spot: Re-adjudicating Automated Telemetry Assertions with Transport-Level Evidence

Automated assertion suites used to verify web telemetry delivery are themselves subject to verification defects. This study re-adjudicates ambiguous telemetry assertion failures using raw network transport evidence. In its retrospective phase, 37 of 49 recorded assertion failures (75.5%) were classified as oracle artifacts, corresponding to 11 of 12 affected event units (91.7%). A separate post-hoc reconstruction reached 18 out of 18 transport-pass results after correcting observation defects. Prospective evaluation of the corrected oracle on a fresh trace produced zero oracle artifacts across 32 assertions. One remaining failure was classified as a potential product-delivery defect. The findings illustrate how defects in test oracles can distort apparent telemetry reliability. The study is limited to a single system, and transport-level confirmation does not establish downstream analytics ingestion or persistence.