Observability - Audit + Dashboard

Pillar 3 (Audit + Visibility) is rolling out. The good news: the foundation is already shipping. Every policy decision sbx makes is written to a structured JSONL log on disk today - and the lab ships a live dashboard you can run alongside it.

At a glance

Time: ~10 minutes | Prerequisites: You completed the Network demo and (optionally) MCP Hands-On.

This section gives you two things:

A way to read the underlying audit log directly with jq
A live dashboard you can build from labspace/kits/observability/ in the lab repo

Step 1 - Locate the daemon log

The sbx daemon writes JSONL audit records here:

ls -lh "$HOME/Library/Application Support/com.docker.sandboxes/sandboxes/sandboxd/daemon.log"

On Linux it's typically ~/.local/share/com.docker.sandboxes/sandboxes/sandboxd/daemon.log.

Step 2 - Read it with `jq`

Each policy decision is one JSON line. The msg field is "governance policy evaluation", and useful fields include resource_value, allowed, policy_matched_rule, policy_deny_reason, policy_source.

LOG="$HOME/Library/Application Support/com.docker.sandboxes/sandboxes/sandboxd/daemon.log"

# Last 20 policy decisions
jq -c 'select(.msg == "governance policy evaluation")' "$LOG" | tail -20

# Only denies
jq -c 'select(.msg == "governance policy evaluation" and .allowed == false)' "$LOG" | tail -20

# Count denies per rule
jq -r 'select(.msg == "governance policy evaluation" and .allowed == false) | .policy_matched_rule // "(default-deny)"' "$LOG" \
  | sort | uniq -c | sort -rn

# Explicit (rule matched) vs implicit (default-deny)
jq -r 'select(.msg == "governance policy evaluation" and .allowed == false) | .policy_deny_reason' "$LOG" \
  | sort | uniq -c

This is your SIEM-ready surface. Forward this file to Splunk/Datadog/Sentinel and you have an org-grade audit trail for sandbox policy decisions.

What's captured and what isn't

Captured today	Not captured today
Timestamp	User identity
Resource (domain, port, path)	Sandbox name (sandbox_id)
Decision (allow/deny)	Prompt or tool-call payload
Matched rule name	MCP tool-call audit (separate roadmap)
Deny reason (explicit / implicit)	Cross-machine aggregation
Policy source (local / remote)

The audit log answers what was decided and why. It doesn't yet answer who triggered it on this machine - that's roadmap.

Step 3 - Run the dashboard

The lab repo ships a small dashboard built on top of the daemon log. Clone the lab repo if you haven't, then start it from the observability kit:

git clone https://github.com/ajeetraina/labspace-ai-governance
cd labspace-ai-governance/labspace/kits/observability
docker compose --profile with-gateway up -d --build

Then open it in a fresh browser tab:

open http://localhost:8090

Tip

If the dashboard is empty, trigger a few events with the commands in Step 4 - it populates live.

Step 4 - Generate some events to watch

In another terminal, enter a sandbox and trigger denies:

mkdir -p ~/scratch && cd ~/scratch
sbx run shell .

Inside the sandbox prompt:

curl -sS https://collabnix.com -o /dev/null -w "%{http_code}\n"
curl -sS https://example.com -o /dev/null -w "%{http_code}\n"
curl -sS https://api.anthropic.com -o /dev/null -w "%{http_code}\n"

Switch to the dashboard. You'll see three new rows appear in real time:

paste.ee or collabnix.com → deny with explicit reason and your matched rule name
example.com → deny with implicit reason (default-deny)
api.anthropic.com → allow

The per-rule deny count panel on the left updates live.

Step 5 - Layer MCP traffic on top (optional)

If you have the Variant B MCP gateway from MCP Hands-On running on localhost:8811, the dashboard automatically picks up its logs (it discovers any running container whose image name contains mcp-gateway).

Trigger an MCP call through it and you'll see entries with source mcp-gateway alongside the sbx rows - both signals in one screen.

What you just demonstrated

Pillar 3's audit substrate already ships in sbx: structured JSONL ready for SIEM ingestion
A live UI can be built on top in a few hundred lines of code
The honest gap (no user attribution, no MCP-tool-level audit yet) is now visible to your security team in the same view that shows what is captured

For a security review conversation, this section is the one that lands. You're not promising a feature - you're showing the structured event stream that already exists, and the work it would take to wrap it in your org's SIEM.

Frequently asked: prompts and tool calls

The most common question after seeing this dashboard:

"Can it show me the prompts the agent sent and which MCP tool was called?"

Short answer: no, and the dashboard is intentionally honest about that. Here's the precise breakdown.

Prompts

Not logged. The sbx proxy does MITM TLS interception so it could technically read request bodies, but it only captures network metadata (destination, port, decision). No request bodies. Almost certainly a deliberate product choice - logging prompt content has privacy and legal implications.

MCP tool calls

Only visible for gateways you run yourself, and only as heuristic log lines:

Mode 4 (local stdio): the subprocess runs on your host; wrap it yourself if you need audit
Mode 2/3 via local gateway with --verbose=true: the dashboard tails the gateway stdout and surfaces call-tool / list-tools classifications. Not structured per-call records.
Mode 1 (hosted servers like Notion, GitHub): invisible from your side. You see the TCP connect in sbx, you don't see which tool was called.

For structured tool-call audit, docker/mcp-gateway would need to emit JSONL audit events. It doesn't today - file a feature request.

Who triggered each event

The sbx daemon log has no user, sandbox_id, or agent field. Per-machine logs answer what was decided, not who triggered it. For org-wide audit you'd want sbx to enrich each event with user_email from the Docker login session - a feasible feature request, not currently shipping.

What ships today vs roadmap

What	Today	Roadmap
Network policy decisions (allow/deny/rule/reason)	✅ JSONL in daemon.log	-
Filesystem mount decisions	✅ same	-
User attribution	❌	Likely (no API change required)
Prompt content	❌	Probably never default
Structured MCP tool-call audit	❌ (heuristic only)	Yes, via gateway changes
Hosted MCP server audit	❌	Part of MCP Tool Governance (Pillar 2)
Cross-machine aggregation	❌	Via SIEM ingestion of the daemon.log

That's the entire picture you can defend to a security team.

Where to go from here

Forward the daemon.log to your SIEM (Splunk HEC, Datadog HTTP intake, Elastic HTTP)
Read the kit's README.md for caveats and config
Watch this space for sbx audit CLI and MCP-tool-level audit - both on the roadmap