birddog

Audited Bright Data egress for AI agents. Drop one context manager around an agent that scrapes the web and you get:

1. Domain allowlist — deny everything outside it, log the attempt
2. Per-domain rate caps — simple token bucket per host
3. Response audit log — one JSONL line per fetch (url, status, bytes, ms)
4. Bright Data Web Unlocker proxy — opt-in: route via Bright Data
5. Streamlit dashboard — point it at the JSONL, get per-host bytes, denial counts, latency p50

Built for the kind of agent that hits live sites: research bots, price trackers, RAG ingest jobs. If you've ever watched an agent rip through a sponsor's free tier in 30 seconds, this is for you.

Install

pip install birddog                    # core
pip install "birddog[dashboard]"       # + Streamlit dashboard

Python 3.10+.

Why

LLM agents don't know what a sane scraping cadence looks like. They'll hammer a site, ignore robots.txt, follow links into spammy subdomains, and burn through a Bright Data quota in a single run.

birddog puts a leash on the egress side:

It does not parse HTML, manage cookies, render JS, or rotate user agents. That's what Bright Data + your scraping code are for.

Usage

from birddog import Birddog

bd = Birddog(
    allowed_domains={"docs.brightdata.com", "*.example.com"},
    per_domain_qps=1.0,
    per_domain_burst=2.0,
    audit_path="runs/scrape.jsonl",
    # Optional — route through Bright Data Web Unlocker:
    bright_data={
        "host": "brd.superproxy.io:33335",
        "username": "brd-customer-...-zone-web_unlocker",
        "password": "...",
    },
)

with bd.session("research-bot") as s:
    r = s.fetch("https://docs.brightdata.com/api")
    print(r.status, r.bytes_len, "bytes")

    # second hit within 1s -> RateLimitedError (qps cap = 1)
    s.fetch("https://docs.brightdata.com/pricing")

    # off-allowlist -> DomainDeniedError, also logged
    s.fetch("https://evil.example/exfil")

FetchResult carries url, status, text, headers, elapsed_ms, and a via_brightdata flag so downstream code can tell whether the response came through the proxy.

Audit log

One JSON object per line, e.g.:

{"ts":1747779600.12,"session_id":"research-bot","kind":"fetch_ok",
 "url":"https://docs.brightdata.com/api","host":"docs.brightdata.com",
 "status":200,"bytes":4221,"elapsed_ms":312.4}
{"ts":1747779600.45,"session_id":"research-bot","kind":"domain_denied",
 "url":"https://evil.example/exfil","host":"evil.example",
 "error":"host 'evil.example' not in allowlist"}

Kinds: session_open, fetch_ok, fetch_failed, domain_denied, rate_limited, session_close.

Dashboard

pip install "birddog[dashboard]"
streamlit run -m birddog.dashboard -- --audit runs/scrape.jsonl

Shows total fetches, denials, bytes, and a per-host breakdown of fetches + bytes + p50 latency.

Demos

Two runnable examples in examples/:

1. Smoke test — scrape_demo.py

python examples/scrape_demo.py

Hits each feature once: happy path, domain denial, rate-limit burst, summary. Offline via httpx.MockTransport.

2. Realistic agent — watchdog_agent.py

python examples/watchdog_agent.py

A small price-tracker agent. Polls a watchlist of product pages, extracts prices, alerts when something moves more than a per-product threshold. Three passes show:

• allowlist denials (off-domain mirror URL is dropped)
• per-domain rate cap kicking in on pass 3
• threshold alerts (Δ -6.4% > 3.0%)
• a runs/watchdog.jsonl audit log you can dashboard

Set BIRDDOG_USE_BRIGHTDATA=1 + your Bright Data Web Unlocker env vars to flip the demo to a real proxy.

Companion libraries

birddog is the egress half of a small agent-stack:

• agentleash — USD/call budget cap + tool-arg schema gate
• agentvet — tool-arg validation with LLM-friendly retry hints
• agentsnap — snapshot tests for agent traces
• agenttrace — cost + latency aggregation per run

Pair birddog with agentleash and you have egress allowlist + budget cap on the same agent.

License

MIT