What is an Automation Audit Log?

General application logs are written for debugging and are often noisy, unstructured, and rotated out quickly. An automation audit log is purpose-built for accountability: it records the automation's identity, the trigger that started it, each step it executed, and the final result, in a schema stable enough to query months later. The distinction matters once automations start acting with real authority — sending emails, moving money, changing records. Without a dedicated log, it becomes nearly impossible to answer “why did the bot do that” after the fact, because the evidence is scattered across ephemeral debug output. A proper automation audit log is queryable by automation name, tenant, date range, and outcome, which is what makes incident review and compliance reporting tractable.