Audit Logging
Our reliability layer records important system actions so production behavior can be reconstructed after the fact.
Not ordinary logging
An audit log can preserve actor, tool, action, time, input, output, approval, and failure.
Operational logs answer questions such as why is this service slow? Audit records answer questions such as what acted, on what data, under whose authority, and what happened next?
Execution record
A consequential workflow can produce an event sequence such as:
- Workflow initiated
- Evidence retrieved
- Model / rule decision
- Tool proposed
- Approval recorded
- Action executed
- Result validated
The audit layer can retain identifiers that connect those stages without requiring every piece of raw content to be copied into one log record.
This becomes especially important when an automated system interacts with external software. A final database state may show what exists now without showing which model, rule, tool call, approval, or retry created it.
Failure reconstruction
Auditability is valuable when something goes wrong. A failure can originate in retrieval, model reasoning, authorization, external API behavior, repeated delivery, human approval, or rollback. Without a traceable sequence, those paths collapse into a vague explanation that “the automation did it.”
We want failures to be reconstructable.
Scope and tradeoffs
Logging everything without discipline can create its own problems: storage growth, sensitive-data duplication, noisy records, and slower investigation.
The audit surface should therefore be intentional. Important actions and state transitions need enough information for attribution and reconstruction, while unnecessary sensitive payloads should not be duplicated merely for completeness.
Audit logging does not make the system correct. It makes important behavior inspectable, attributable, and diagnosable, which is a prerequisite for operating automated systems credibly in production.
Audit logs and ordinary logs are separate concerns
A high-volume debug log may be rotated aggressively and contain implementation detail that has little governance value. An audit event may be much smaller but need stronger retention and immutability, because it establishes who or what authorized a consequential state transition. We therefore do not assume one logging pipeline must serve every purpose.
The audit model can also preserve correlation identifiers that connect an action to the workflow, approval, model execution, and source evidence that preceded it without duplicating every payload. Where input or output data is sensitive, the log can record references, hashes, metadata, or bounded excerpts rather than copying the complete underlying record.
The useful property is reconstructability: enough durable evidence to explain the action without turning the audit system into another unrestricted copy of company data.