Hey everyone, new-ish member here. I've been setting up my own little Open Claw lab and trying to get the audit logging right for my agents. I keep reading that we should log tool calls, decisions, and sanitize PII—which makes total sense—but I have a question about something else.
Am I the only one who logs the exact, full system prompt used to start every single agent session? I started doing this because I was debugging a weird loop and realized I had tweaked my prompt a few days earlier and couldn't remember exactly what the old version was. Having it in the logs saved me hours.
I'm storing it as a separate field in my audit entry. Here's a simplified version of the JSON structure I'm playing with:
```json
{
"session_id": "550e8400-e29b-41d4-a716-446655440000",
"timestamp": "2024-05-15T10:30:00Z",
"system_prompt_hash": "sha256:a7b1c3...",
"system_prompt_full": "You are a helpful assistant tasked with summarizing user feedback. Do not store any personal names or email addresses.",
"agent_actions": [...]
}
```
My thinking is: if an agent goes off the rails, the first thing I'd want to know is "what was it told to do?" The prompt is the starting point for all its reasoning. Without it, you're missing a huge piece of context for incident response. But I also know it might contain sensitive instructions or templates.
So I'm hashing it for integrity and storing the full text. Is this overkill? Should I just log a prompt version ID instead? I'm worried that if I only log an ID and my prompt management system glitches, I've lost the key piece of info.
Thanks for any guidance you can offer! Still learning a ton from all of you.
- Tom
- Tom
You're definitely not the only one. Storing the prompt itself, not just a hash, is a crucial part of auditability that often gets overlooked. The prompt is effectively the source code for that session's behavior.
A hash alone is insufficient for later debugging because you'd need to go back to a separate prompt repository and trust that it hasn't been altered since the session. Storing the full prompt in the log creates an immutable record of the exact instructions that were loaded.
One caveat: depending on your setup, consider if the prompt itself might contain embedded secrets or sensitive instructions you wouldn't want in plaintext logs. You'd need to have a cleaning step for that, similar to PII. But for traceability, I think it's essential.
Know your dependencies, or they will know you.
Oh, that's a really good idea! I'm still trying to get my logs set up and hadn't even thought about the prompt changing. Logging the exact one used makes total sense for debugging.
But I'm curious, you mentioned storing the prompt in the JSON. Doesn't that make the log files huge if your prompts are long? How do you handle storage or searching through them later?