Once an engagement is running, SpartanX lets you observe its progress in real time. This is useful both for understanding what the platform is doing and for maintaining an audit trail of how findings were produced.
Opening a running engagement shows its current status and the phase it is currently executing. In the early stages, this is often the reconnaissance phase, where the platform is mapping the target and identifying the most relevant paths for deeper testing.
What you can see in the live activity view
The live view gives you access to the execution trail as it happens.
Area | What you can learn |
Completed steps | Which tasks have already finished |
Current execution | What the agents are working on right now |
Agent reasoning | Why specific actions or decisions are being taken |
Timeline | How the engagement is progressing over time |
This level of visibility is valuable because it shows methodology, not just results. You can see the same kinds of actions a human tester would typically perform, such as fingerprinting the target, checking robots.txt, enumerating services, and scanning exposed ports.
Why the live log matters
The real-time log is not only for observation during the engagement. It also becomes a permanent audit trail after the engagement completes. You can return later to understand why certain paths were followed, what evidence supported a conclusion, and how the platform arrived at a given finding.
That makes the activity log useful for validation, internal review, and communicating methodology to stakeholders who want more than a final report.
Review what is in scope
The Assets tab inside the engagement shows what the engagement is currently testing. If the engagement was launched in strict mode, the platform remains within the exact scope you defined. It will not automatically branch into related infrastructure or discovered endpoints outside that boundary.
If you want broader expansion in future engagements, that decision needs to be made when you create the engagement by choosing auto-extend mode.
What to do while an engagement is running
In most cases, the best practice is to use the live view as a monitoring and validation tool. Confirm that the engagement is operating against the intended target, review the reasoning log if something needs clarification, and allow the cycle to complete before moving into formal analysis and reporting.
This helps teams stay informed without interrupting the testing workflow.