---
term: "Audit trail"
category: "Evidence and audit"
url: https://agenticopenfinance.com/glossary/audit-trail
source: AgenticOpenFinance glossary
---

# Audit trail

> A chronological record of who accessed a system and what operations they performed, enough to reconstruct events.

An audit trail is a chronological record of system activity, showing who accessed a system and what operations were performed, sufficient to reconstruct and examine the sequence of events. NIST's glossary gives several closely related definitions of the term. For agents, the trail must record both identities, the agent and the principal, along with the mandate relied on, each tool call and its result, and any human approvals.

Related terms: [Automatic logging](https://agenticopenfinance.com/glossary/automatic-logging.md), [Evidence pack](https://agenticopenfinance.com/glossary/evidence-pack.md), [Tamper-evident log](https://agenticopenfinance.com/glossary/tamper-evident-log.md), [Record retention](https://agenticopenfinance.com/glossary/record-retention.md)