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Monitor an AI agent as you would a user and a workload: give it a distinct identity, collect records of its actions and the tools and systems around it, protect those records, and make sure an accountable person can investigate and contain it. A prompt-and-response transcript alone cannot show the full picture. The UK National Cyber Security Centre (NCSC) says agent activity should be treated as user activity and calls for visibility into both agent telemetry and sandbox events such as access, proxy, and network logs. NCSC guidance
What should an AI-agent audit cover?
An agent can plan and act through tools, data sources, memory, and connected workflows. That means a useful audit record must help the SOC reconstruct both what the agent did and what happened around it. The Canadian Centre for Cyber Security and co-authoring agencies identify risks including prompt injection, unauthorized actions, cascading failures, identity spoofing, and privilege drift. Their agentic AI guidance recommends treating these systems within established cybersecurity practices.
At minimum, build visibility across three layers:
- Agent activity: traces and transcripts, including actions the system attempted and their outcomes, to the extent your implementation exposes them.
- Tools and identities: tool calls, accessed resources, the identity used, permission changes, and any required approvals.
- Execution environment: relevant access, proxy, and network events from the sandbox or other environment in which the agent runs.
The NCSC specifically recommends access to agent traces and transcripts as well as sandbox access logs, proxy logs, and network activity. Its observability guidance does not establish that private model reasoning is universally available, reliable, safe to retain, or sufficient to explain an action. Record what your system actually exposes, then correlate it with tool and environment events rather than treating any one trace as a complete account.
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Before connecting an agent to a security workflow, define what it is allowed to do and who is responsible for it. This makes telemetry interpretable: a SOC can compare activity with the agent’s intended task, approved resources, and permissions.
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Inventory the deployment
Record the agent or service, model, connected tools, data stores, identities, permissions, triggers, and systems it can affect. State the permitted task and operational boundaries. The joint guidance hosted by the Canadian Centre for Cyber Security recommends fitting agent risk management into existing cybersecurity practices, including threat modeling and security assessments. Read the guidance
Use a distinct, least-privilege identity
Assign each agent a distinct identity where feasible and limit its permissions to those needed for its defined task. Log identity and privilege changes so reviewers can spot unexpected changes, drift, or possible impersonation. The NCSC and joint international guidance both emphasize identity management and limiting broad access. NCSC · Joint guidance
Name the people accountable
Assign named owners for deployment, access approval, monitoring, incident review, and stopping the agent. Make sure the person expected to respond has authority and a practical way to intervene. The NCSC’s adoption guidance states: “If you cannot understand, monitor or contain an agent’s actions, it is not ready for deployment.” NCSC adoption guidance, May 15, 2026
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Build an audit record that can support an investigation
For each meaningful activity, aim to preserve enough context to answer who or what acted, when it acted, which identity and permissions it used, what tool or resource it accessed, what action resulted, and which surrounding events occurred. This is an implementation target drawn from the NCSC’s telemetry recommendations and the joint guidance’s recommendations to monitor agent operations, identity, privileges, and behavior; it is not a prescribed official event schema. NCSC · Joint guidance
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Correlate agent records with conventional security telemetry using available identifiers and timestamps. For example, an agent event that records a tool invocation is more useful alongside the corresponding access or network event than on its own. The goal is a defensible timeline, not a claim that the model’s internal reasoning is fully observable.
Logging also creates a sensitive data store and a potential attack surface. Define retention and access policies, restrict and monitor access to the logs, and protect records from unauthorized changes or deletion. The NCSC recommends immutability where possible; CISA’s general business-system logging guidance offers complementary advice on protecting logs, though it is not specific to AI agents. NCSC · CISA logging guidance
Assess the collection pipeline itself as part of the deployment’s attack surface. Check whether an agent could exploit a monitoring integration, gain extra privileges through it, or use it as a route beyond its intended environment. Monitoring should not silently broaden the agent’s access.
Detect, review, and escalate concerning behavior
Include agent activity in security operations monitoring and incident response. Where operationally feasible, route concerning events for near-real-time review so the response does not depend entirely on discovering them in a later audit. The joint international guidance announced by CISA and partners on May 1, 2026 recommends continuous monitoring, threat modeling, and regular security assessments as part of managing agentic AI risk. It addresses broader adoption in IT environments rather than setting a prescriptive SOC standard. CISA announcement
When reviewing an event, ask whether:
- The action fit the agent’s defined task and boundaries.
- The identity and permissions were expected, including whether either changed.
- The tool, resource, or network destination was approved.
- A human approval gate was required and, if so, recorded.
- Related environment events indicate manipulation, compromise, or an unintended side effect.
These are practical review questions based on the monitoring areas in the official guidance, not an official checklist. Define escalation rules for the risks relevant to your deployment, and make sure alerts reach someone who can investigate and act.
Use human oversight for consequential actions
For actions with significant security or operational impact, combine human oversight with technically enforced controls. A person cannot meaningfully inspect every rapid action after it has happened; approval gates or other constraints can prevent an action from proceeding without the required authorization. The NCSC says a separate “judge” AI may help with oversight, but it should be independently evaluated because it also has limitations and potential second-order effects. NCSC guidance
Prepare a containment path before deployment
Document how responders can stop agent processes and restrict network access to agent infrastructure. Depending on the design, containment may also require interrupting communication with model inference services. Verify that the control affects the running workload and its communications, rather than merely pausing a user-interface session. The NCSC includes shutdown and network restriction among its operational recommendations. NCSC guidance
Start with bounded, low-risk experiments while human oversight is available. Expand autonomy only after the organization understands whether its monitoring, permissions, and containment controls work as intended. In particular, do not assume that an agent safe under staffed conditions is ready to operate unattended overnight or on weekends. Treat reports of an agent’s external activity as incident or abuse reports and use the organization’s established response process.
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Evaluate monitoring coverage without assuming a vendor ranking
Use these criteria to assess a proposed monitoring approach, integration, or deployment. They describe control needs found in current guidance, not tested product rankings or performance results.
- Telemetry coverage: Does it capture agent actions and state, tool use, identity and privilege changes, and relevant access, proxy, and network events?
- Detection and review latency: Can events be reviewed and escalated quickly enough for the risk, and is monitoring staffed for the agent’s operating schedule?
- Evidence integrity and sensitivity: Are access restricted, retention defined, and records protected against tampering or deletion, with immutability where possible?
- Human oversight: Are accountable owners, meaningful approval points, and intervention authority established?
- Containment scope: Can responders stop the process and restrict communications to agent infrastructure, not just pause a user interface?
- Identity and least privilege: Does each agent have an identifiable identity, task-limited access, and visibility into permission changes?
No product performance tests or validated vendor rankings for this use case are established by the cited guidance. Choose tools against the controls and telemetry your deployment actually requires rather than assuming that a particular SIEM or observability platform has been tested for agent auditing.
Keep the program aligned with evolving guidance
Agent monitoring is part of a broader risk-management program, not a one-time logging setup. Reassess the deployment as its tools, permissions, workflows, and threat conditions change. CISA and its partners recommend aligning agent risk management with existing frameworks, restricting broad access, using layered defense and strong identity management, and conducting threat modeling, continuous monitoring, and regular assessments. CISA and partners, May 1, 2026
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