A Collector exporter that turns agent traces into a signed, verifiable audit log (now in the registry). Feedback on the approach welcome.
Sharing a component I built and recently got listed in the OpenTelemetry registry: otel-agent-audit.
The idea: as AI agents take real actions, you want a provable record of what happened. Instead of adding a new instrumentation layer, this consumes the gen_ai.* spans your agents already emit and turns them into a tamper-evident audit log, entirely inside the Collector pipeline.
The pipeline:
otlp -> memory_limiter -> agentauditselect (buffers each trace until its root arrives) -> agentaudit exporter (per-trace hash chain -> Ed25519 sign -> seal) -> audit.jsonl + checkpoint.jsonl
A separate verifier CLI checks the whole thing with only the public key, so anyone can independently verify authenticity and integrity without a shared secret.
Things I'd love this community's take on:
- Passive instrumentation as the right model: reusing existing spans rather than asking teams to re-instrument.
- Whether governance/guardrail decisions belong in spans, and how they'd ideally map to semantic conventions. I'm interested in where the GenAI SIG is heading on policy/guardrail signals.
- The single-writer constraint (one Collector instance) that deterministic ordering forces, and whether that trade is acceptable.
Caveats up front: third-party, experimental, not audited. It's observability only, it does not enforce or block. It gives tamper-evidence on honest infra, not protection against an operator holding the signing key.
Repo: https://github.com/surpradhan/otel-agent-audit
It's in the registry under "agent audit" if you want to see the entry.
Would genuinely value critique of the approach.