What is an audit trail?
An audit trail is a time-ordered record of who did what, when and with what result, detailed enough to reconstruct how an event or change came about.
Last updated 29 October 2026
What each record should show
- What happened: the type of event, such as access granted or a refund issued.
- When it happened, with an accurate time stamp.
- Where it happened: the system or app involved.
- Who or what started it, and anyone else involved, such as the approver.
- The outcome: whether it succeeded or failed.
Keeping it trustworthy
- Protect records from being changed or deleted, and alert someone if that happens.
- Keep them for as long as your policies, auditors and regulators require.
- Keep them in one place you can search and export, so evidence for an audit or an investigation is ready without rebuilding it by hand.
What it's for
An audit trail answers questions after the fact: who gave this person admin access, who approved this refund, what changed before the outage. Investigations of security incidents rely on it, and so do audits that ask for proof that controls worked. When AI takes actions in your systems, the trail should also show which rule allowed each action and who approved it.
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Is an audit trail the same as a log?
Close. A log holds individual entries, which NIST calls audit records. An audit trail is the sequence of records you follow to reconstruct one event from start to finish.
How long should audit records be kept?
As long as your policies, auditors and regulators require. NIST leaves the period to each organisation, in line with its records retention policy.
What does BeforeQuery record?
For IT, the AI ITSM Agent records who asked, who approved, what changed and when access ends, and access reviews keep every decision with the reviewer's name, ready to export. For support, every refund is recorded with the rule that allowed it.
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