AI Guard security signals provide visibility into threats and attacks AI Guard detects in your applications. These signals are built on top of AAP (Application and API Protection) security signals and integrate with Datadog’s security monitoring workflows.

Understand AI Guard signals

Datadog creates AI Guard security signals when it detects a threat based on a configured detection rule. Signals indicating threats such as prompt injection, jailbreaking, or tool misuse appear in the Datadog Security Signals explorer. These signals can provide:

• Threat detection: Attack context based on your configured detection rules
• Action insights: Blocked or allowed actions information according to your rule settings
• Rich investigation context: Attack categories detected, AI Guard evaluation results, and links to related AI Guard spans for comprehensive analysis
• Custom runbooks: Custom remediation guidance and response procedures for specific threat scenarios

Create detection rules

You can create custom detection rules by defining thresholds for when you want to receive notifications; for example, more than 5 DENY actions in 10 minutes. When AI Guard evaluations exceed those thresholds, it generates security signals.

To create AI Guard detection rules:

1. In Datadog, go to the AI Guard detection rule explorer, then click New Rule.

2. Under Define Search Queries, define the types of tags you want to create signals for. You can use the following AI Guard attributes to filter and target specific threat patterns:

   Tag	Description	Possible values
   @ai_guard.action	Filter by AI Guard's evaluation result	ALLOW or DENY
   @ai_guard.attack_categories	Target specific attack types	jailbreak indirect-prompt-injection destructive-tool-call denial-of-service-tool-call security-exploit authority-override role-play instruction-override obfuscation system-prompt-extraction data-exfiltration
   @ai_guard.blocked	Filter based on whether an action in the trace was blocked	true or false
   @ai_guard.tools	Filter by specific tool names involved in the evaluation	get_user_profile, user_recent_transactions, etc.
   @ai_guard.sds.categories	Filter by sensitive data categories detected by Sensitive Data Scanner	credentials, email_address, etc.
   @ai_guard.sds.rule_tags	Filter by specific sensitive data rule tags	aws_access_key_id, aws_secret_access_key, claude_api_key, email_address, etc.

3. Under Define Rule Conditions, define your threshold conditions, set severity levels, choose who should get notifications for new signals and how often, and choose security responses to take.
4. Under Describe your Playbook, customize the notification and define tags to send with the signals.

For more comprehensive detection rule capabilities, see detection rules.

Investigate signals

To view and investigate AI Guard security signals, and correlate them with other security events, you can view signals in two places:

• Application and API Protection Security Signals explorer

• Cloud SIEM Security Signals explorer

  In the Cloud SIEM Security Signals explorer, beside the search bar, click the Filter icon and select the App & API Protection checkbox to view AI Guard signals.

The Security Signals explorers allow you to filter, prioritize, and investigate AI Guard signals alongside other application security threats, providing a unified view of your security posture.

Further reading

Additional helpful documentation, links, and articles:

AI GuardDOCUMENTATION Get Started with AI GuardDOCUMENTATION Detection RulesDOCUMENTATION