Agent Forensics

Ability to reconstruct why an agent performed an action by linking audit logs, distributed traces, tool/agent calls, and prompt-response records.

Key points

• Google Cloud uses the example “this BigQuery access happened; why did it happen?” to define the need for agent forensics ^[src-043].
• Forensics requires correlation across audit logs, traces, spans, agent calls, tool calls, and potentially the exact prompt-response pair that triggered the access ^[src-043].
• Prompt and response logs may require finer-grained access control because they can contain sensitive data or PII ^[src-043].
• Agent forensics moves observability from “which component made the call” to “what reasoning path and intent produced the call” ^[src-043].

Related concepts

• Governance Observability
• LLM Observability
• Intent Loyalty
• Agent Circuit Breakers

Source references

• ^[src-043] Google Cloud Events — “Operationalize AI: A blueprint for managing enterprise agents at scale” (2026-04-24)