Audit logs and compliance: what gets recorded and why Published: April 21, 2026 Category: Security · Compliance Reading time: 15 minutes Author: NEXUS AI Team A production incident happens at 2:47 AM. You wake up to alerts. By the time you open your laptop, the question isn't "what failed" — your monitoring already told you that. The question is "who changed what, when, and from where?" Without audit logs, that question takes hours. With audit logs, it takes minutes. NEXUS AI records 42 distinct event types across 7 categories — every authentication attempt, every secret operation, every deployment action, every permission change. This post covers exactly what gets recorded, what each severity level means, how retention works, and how the audit log maps to the compliance controls your team, auditors, and regulators care about. Why audit logs exist — and why most teams underinvest in them Audit logs are not a debugging tool. They are an accountability system. The difference matters.…