Agent monitoring, end to end

This recipe takes a workspace from one person trying Beam to every coding agent in the team watched and governed: Claude Code, Codex, Cursor, Gemini CLI, Copilot CLI and others. Work through it in order; each step ends with a check.

What you'll have

• Every supported coding agent on every developer machine hooked, with its actions captured locally and sent to the workspace.
• MCP servers inventoried, with risky responses filtered before they reach an agent.
• A workspace policy that started in observe mode and now asks or blocks where it should.
• Risky skills held for approval before an agent loads them.
• Alerts for findings that matter, and a weekly review of what agents did.
• Past agent sessions imported, so the history starts before the rollout.

Before you start

Step 1: Set up your own machine first

npm i -g @agent-beam/beam
beam setup

beam setup finds the agents installed on the machine, adds Beam's hook to each one without replacing existing hooks, inventories MCP servers, connects the device to your workspace through a browser sign-in, downloads the policy and starts the background service. No Node.js? Use curl -fsSL https://agentbeam.com/install.sh | bash first.

Check:

beam whoami            # this device and workspace
beam agent list        # each agent and whether its hook is installed
beam service status    # the collector is running

Then run any harmless command in Claude Code or Codex (for example "list the files here"), and open beam studio: the action is there with its agent, tool and command.

Step 2: Watch what agents do, locally and in the dashboard

• Local Studio (beam studio) shows this machine's activity, live, without leaving it.
• Observability and Sessions in the dashboard show every connected device's agents, sessions, tools, token use and findings.
• Agents lists each device's agents and versions; MCP Scan lists their MCP servers.

To bring in history from before Beam was installed:

beam agent extract claude-code          # preview what's in local transcripts
beam agent extract claude-code --save   # import it into the collector
beam agent extract codex --save

Check: your machine appears under Agents, and its session from step 1 is under Sessions.

Step 3: Bring the team

Invite people from Members and give each the least role they need: members for developers, security manager or auditor for reviewers. Each person runs the two commands from step 1. To let their coding agent do it, have them run:

npx -y @agent-beam/beam add skill agentbeam-setup -g --all-agents

and ask their agent to "set up AgentBeam". For a managed fleet, push the CLI with your device management tool and have each person run beam setup once to sign in.

Check: Agents lists every developer machine, with a recent last-seen time.

Step 4: Protect MCP servers and skills

• MCP responses. Run an MCP server through Beam's filter so secrets in its responses are redacted before the agent sees them: beam mcp proxy <command> [args...] in place of the server's command in your MCP configuration.
• Risky skills are held automatically. When an agent loads a skill (the Skill tool, or reading a SKILL.md), the hook scans it first. Prompt injection or a critical finding makes the agent ask you before loading it, or blocks it under an enforce policy. Review it with beam skills scan <path>; if you trust it, beam skills trust <path> pins that exact content.
• Inventory. beam skills index finds every skill on the machine and beam skills sync sends names and risk scores (never contents) to Skills Scan.

See the skill testing cookbook for the full skill workflow.

Step 5: Move the policy from observe to enforce

Policies live under Policies in the dashboard. Do this in three passes:

1. Observe (week 1). Add the policy presets you want (recursive delete, destructive Git commands, credential file references, package publishing, cloud CLIs and so on) with the mode on Observe. Nothing is blocked; findings show what would have been.
2. Advisory (week 2). Switch to Advisory: matching actions ask the developer for approval in Claude Code and Codex. Watch Risks for actions people approve all the time and tune the rules.
3. Enforce. Switch to Enforce for the rules you're sure of. Use member overrides to make the policy stricter for specific people (contractors, production access); overrides can only tighten.

beam sync   # on a test machine: pull the new policy now instead of within 60 seconds

Check: in a test session, ask an agent to run a command your policy blocks (for example rm -rf ./build with the Recursive delete preset). Claude Code or Codex shows Beam's denial; the action is under Risks.

Step 6: Route alerts

On Integrations, connect Slack, Microsoft Teams, PagerDuty, email or a signed webhook to your SIEM, then add alert workflows for agent findings at the severities you care about. Device alerts shows tamper alerts (an agent or process trying to change, stop or remove Beam) and deliberate uninstalls and logouts.

Step 7: A weekly review

• Risks: work through new high and critical findings; mark each reviewed, or turn a recurring one into a policy rule.
• Device alerts: open tamper alerts, and any machine where Beam was uninstalled or logged out.
• Agents and MCP Scan: new agents or MCP servers nobody approved.
• Audit log: policy, member and integration changes, exportable as CSV.

Coverage checklist