Automation Orchestrator writes structured operational logs to pod standard output for every platform component. When configured, it forwards logs to an external OpenTelemetry Protocol (OTLP) compatible observability backend.

Operational logs capture technical infrastructure-level detail that complements the structured audit event record. Audit events record business-level activity: what happened, who caused it, and what was affected. Operational logs record infrastructure detail: component startup, request processing, error stack traces, and diagnostic output. Use audit events for compliance and security monitoring. Use operational logs for infrastructure troubleshooting and incident diagnosis.

Each platform component writes structured JSON lines to pod standard output. Operational logs are not stored in the platform database — they are ephemeral, and retention is governed by OpenShift node log rotation. When otel.enabled=true is configured, operational logs are forwarded to the configured OTLP endpoint in addition to pod stdout.

Agentic automation workflows produce significantly higher log volume than traditional scripted workflows. A single agentic workflow run can produce 10 to 100 times more log lines than an equivalent non-agentic workflow. Enable OTLP log forwarding to a persistent log aggregation backend for production agentic workloads.

Important

Log retention and volume capacity planning is required before deploying agentic workflows in production.