Audit log
- Standard term
An audit log is a time-ordered record of system actions someone may later need to trace, noting who or what acted, what it did, to which item, whether it worked, and when.
An agent can make hundreds of changes across tools in one unwatched run, and its log is usually the one place listing them together. When it asks a tool to act, such as updating a tracker task or sending an email, a useful log notes the request and the tool's reply separately, failures and skipped items included, since a request can fail unnoticed.
Where you’ll meet it
An agent updates your team's project tracker each evening from the day's messages. One morning a teammate finds her task marked done, though she hasn't started it. The agent's log says only "Updated 37 tasks."
What to do
That line can't tell you which message caused the change, or whether other tasks went wrong too. Ask the agent to write one log line per change, with the run number, the task, the field it changed with its old and new values, and the message the change came from.
Easy to mix up
| Audit log | Approval gate |
|---|---|
| Afterward, when someone looks back | Beforehand, holding the action until someone says yes |
Check yourself
Your agent keeps its audit log in a file inside the folder it works in. The log says every change last week was approved. How much does that tell you?
Go deeperReceipts strengthen a log; clocks, deletion rules, and stored data weaken it
Audit trails come from accounting and computer security. For each result, the system the agent acted on can supply a receipt the agent didn't write, such as the message ID an email provider returns when it accepts a message, and storing it beside the agent's line backs the entry up.
Machines whose clocks disagree record events out of order, and retention settings, which delete records after a set time, can remove entries you need. A log that stores full prompts and documents also becomes a second copy of private data, which needs its own access limits. Before relying on a platform's built-in log, check which actions and inputs it captures.