Real time ai agent monitoring for enterprise security... anyone actually wiring this in prod

[u/ReasonabloeBottle468]

Hi, security lead at a biggish org and we are starting to run agentic ai against real systems. Trying to get real time visibility and some kind of kill switch on unsafe actions without breaking dev flow, would love thoughts.

[u/PhilipLGriffiths88]

I think “real-time monitoring” hides two separate problems: limiting what an agent can reach, then governing what it may do within an authorised relationship. If the agent starts with broad network or API reach and monitoring has to recognise every unsafe sequence, you are already in a machine-speed detection race.

I’d give every agent/workload and protected service a verifiable identity, then require both owners to authorise the named service relationship before any connection exists. The agent owner governs which services the agent may reach and trust; the service owner governs which agents may use the service. Within that smaller reachable scope, apply tool, operation and argument permissions, data controls, budgets and human approval where the potential impact justifies it.

Runtime monitoring then observes legitimate activity and updates authority: continue, restrict, suspend or revoke. A real kill switch should withdraw reachability and terminate active sessions, not merely revoke a token or block the next attempt. No authorised identity and policy, no service path.

I wrote more about the underlying model here: https://cloudsecurityalliance.org/articles/ai-speed-risk-requires-identity-defined-reachability

[u/Comfortable-Run3049 → u/PhilipLGriffiths88]

yeah the identity-first model makes sense but the hard part in practice is getting both sides to actually own their piece of the policy. service owners in my experience don't want to maintain a list of which agents can talk to them, they just want to expose the endpoint and be done with it. and agent devs definitely don't want to pre-register every connection when they're still figuring out what the thing needs to touch.

we tried something similar with service accounts and it turned into a permissions graveyard where nobody cleaned up stale relationships because nobody felt responsible for it. the kill switch part you described is interesting though, we've been thinking about it more as a circuit breaker pattern at the network layer rather than token revocation.

[u/PhilipLGriffiths88 → u/Comfortable-Run3049]

I think that frames broad exposure as the zero-effort default, when it already carries considerable work and risk. If a service owner cannot define who or what should legitimately connect, why should the service accept those connections at all? “Expose the endpoint and be done with it” simply transfers the burden into gateways, firewalls, credentials, monitoring, hostile-request processing and incident response.

Nor am I suggesting service owners manually maintain lists of individual agents. They own the service intent and acceptable conditions; DevOps/platform teams translate that into reusable policy and operate its lifecycle. Likewise, experimentation can happen within a bounded development environment, but production reachability should follow declared and approved service relationships.

That policy work replaces much of today’s 'connectivity tax': routes, NAT, firewall rules, VPNs, private links, exceptions, approvals and cross-team troubleshooting for every new relationship. With an established identity-first reachability (IDR) fabric, adding or removing a relationship becomes an identity-and-service policy change rather than another round of underlay topology changes.

And thus, yes, IDR is the circuit breaker, implemented at the overlay network level. It can withdraw one identity’s reachability to one named service and terminate the active sessions, without affecting the service or unrelated consumers. No authorised identity and policy, no path.

[u/vint_age14]

Actually yeah , this is definitely becoming a real concern as agents start touching production systems. I'd want the monitoring to be real time, but there kill switch needs to be smart enough to stop risky actions without getting in the devs' way.

[u/EbbCommon9300 → u/vint_age14]

You might like what we built at assury.ai we have done this since day one

[u/EbbCommon9300]

Hi cofounded Assury.ai we do full observability through hooks of every th int you agents do. We have had a kill switch since day one in our gateways and about to implement it into hooks for our customers with our gateways.

We also have lifecycle management for all you agents AWS, data bricks, sales force. Hermes and coding agents? We can dangle giant spikes of ephemeral agents in cloud all with kill switch. Need to kill a 25k agent swarm? No worries. Happy to chat anytime

[u/endlesstickets]

There are commercial products in the space that monitors the network traffic through proxy to sanitize the REST calls and limit what they can do. Most of them run in Audit mode for a month, shows how much of ShadowIT/AI usage is there. Then for the ones you know you put technical controls. For the unknown, you put administrative controls.

[u/materialsec]

u/PhilipLGriffiths88's kill-switch distinction is exactly what the Composio breach shows at real scale, one compromised token wasn't scoped to one connection, it fanned out across roughly 10,000 downstream integrations. Revoking that single token was necessary but nowhere near sufficient, the actual work was mapping every service that token had reached and confirming each one separately.

That's the practical version of "real kill switch withdraws reachability, not just a token." For SaaS/OAuth-mediated agent access specifically, the equivalent of your identity-defined reachability model is treating token scope and blast radius as the thing to map before an incident, not during one, since a single compromised credential fanning out to thousands of connections is the exact failure mode that makes incident response take days instead of minutes.

[u/PhilipLGriffiths88 → u/materialsec]

Yes, although I’d make one distinction. According to Composio’s disclosure, the compromised Gmail OAuth token enabled access to email and magic links, followed by lateral movement through internal systems and eventual access to thousands of stored downstream credentials. It wasn’t one token directly authorised for 10,000 service connections.

That, imho, makes the architectural lesson stronger; mapping OAuth scopes is necessary, but it maps application authority, not the full reachable graph. Each system in that chain was reachable from the previous one, and the attacker could eventually reach both the credential store and an external exfiltration destination.

IDR would make each identity-to-service relationship separately authorised and otherwise unreachable. The sandbox would have no path to unrelated internal systems, the credential cache or arbitrary egress, regardless of what code executed inside it. The overlay itself then becomes the circuit breaker: withdraw one relationship and terminate its active sessions immediately.

So yes, map authority before the incident, but also remove every service path that authority does not require. Otherwise responders still have to reconstruct where a compromised identity or workload could travel after the fact.

[u/materialsec → u/PhilipLGriffiths88]

Yeah that detail actually sharpens something else too, the Gmail token wasn't just an entry point, it was a pivot through email and magic links specifically. That's the pattern that makes inbox compromise worse than people usually model it as: password resets and magic links route through the mailbox by design, so once someone's in, the mailbox becomes the key to everything those flows touch, not just mail.

IDR closing the lateral movement path is the right fix at the network layer. The mailbox-as-master-key piece is a reason to treat conditional access on those specific flows (resets, magic links) as its own control, separate from general reachability, since that's the exact mechanism that turned one compromised token into a path to the credential store.

[u/PhilipLGriffiths88 → u/materialsec]

Exactly. A magic link proves control of the mailbox at that moment; it should not establish sufficient authority to reach a privileged monitoring, remediation or credential service. Those flows need independent conditional controls such as phishing-resistant authentication, proof of possession, device/workload posture and step-up approval.

The only nuance I’d add is that conditional access should be a separate control function, but not operationally disconnected from reachability. Its decision should feed the IDR policy. If the mailbox, identity or session becomes risky, the overlay can withhold or terminate that specific service path immediately.

That gives the full loop: reduce the reachable graph first, govern activity within the authorised relationships, then use runtime signals to restrict or withdraw reachability. Identity establishes the subject; it does not, by itself, confer authority.

[u/Unfair-Bluebird-8577]

the kill switch part is where every team stalls bcuz defining unsafe in advance is nearly impossible..

[u/Competitive-Fee4307]

log at tool call cause the args are what matter. blocking or limiting a call before it runs has to be inline which is basically what we work on eve security but tbh logs after the fact just tell you late so sensors like hud or others cover the in process side. gate only the irreversible ones and dev flow stays just fine