Temporal Integrity Metadata (TIM) for Infrastructure Telemetry

Distributed computing systems generate timestamped events from components whose clocks operate under fundamentally different synchronization conditions. Existing logging and observability standards -- including RFC 3164, RFC 5424, SNMP, NETCONF, and OpenTelemetry -- define message formats and telemetry schemas but provide no standard mechanism for an event source to declare the provenance, confidence, or synchronization state of its timestamps. Every platform that must correlate events across components independently invents a proprietary temporal reconciliation layer. These systems fail silently, cannot be validated against a published standard, and are not interoperable. This document defines Temporal Integrity Metadata (TIM): a transport- agnostic structure that any event-emitting system may attach to its telemetry to declare how its timestamp was generated, the synchronization state of its clock, a bounded uncertainty interval, the temporal reference domain, and a monotonic sequence token for ordering events when wall-clock time is unavailable. TIM is backward-compatible with existing protocols, implementable on constrained embedded hardware, and applicable from internet-scale distributed services to air-gapped and orbital deployments.