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Most issues come down to one of a handful of causes. Start with pgshadow status, then work down this list.

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Traffic isn’t being intercepted

If prompts pass through with no verdicts showing up, the agent isn’t seeing the traffic. Check, in order:
1

Confirm the agent is running and healthy

This reports whether the proxy is up, the certificate is trusted, and the engine is reachable. pgshadow doctor runs the same checks with more detail.
2

Confirm the proxy is applied

The PAC proxy must be set where your traffic actually flows. Turning protection off and back on in the app re-applies both the proxy and the certificate trust — that’s the quickest fix on every platform. To check by hand:
The proxy is set per network service (Wi-Fi vs. Ethernet vs. VPN), and switching networks can leave a service uncovered. Check System Settings → Network → your service → Details… → Proxies for the automatic proxy configuration.
3

Confirm the CA is trusted

If TLS interception fails, the browser or app will error or fall back.
Make sure the PromptGuard CA is present and trusted in Keychain Access.
Re-running the app’s Turn on protection flow (or pgshadow init) re-trusts the certificate on all platforms.

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Gemini / Chrome traffic slips past

Chrome and some Google properties (including Gemini) prefer QUIC / HTTP-3, which runs over UDP and can route around the HTTP proxy entirely — so that traffic is never inspected. Fix: disable QUIC via browser policy. In a managed fleet, push a policy that turns off the experimental QUIC protocol (for Chrome, the QuicAllowed=false enterprise policy). With QUIC off, the browser falls back to HTTPS over the proxy and inspection resumes.

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A specific app is never inspected

Some native desktop apps pin their own certificate and reject the agent’s CA outright. These bypass any inspection proxy and are out of scope by design — this is not a misconfiguration. See Known Limitations for the full list and the coverage policy.

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The engine is unreachable

The agent calls a remote /guard engine for each verdict. If it can’t reach the engine, it waits up to 8 seconds, then fails open — the request is allowed through rather than blocking the employee’s work.
  • A short spike of allowed-without-verdict events during a network blip is expected, not a bug.
  • If it’s persistent, check connectivity to the engine (pgshadow status / pgshadow doctor) and, for self-hosted deployments, that the engine instance is healthy. See Deployment Modes.
Fail-open is the shipping behavior: availability of AI tools is preserved during an outage. If your environment requires fail-closed, contact support@promptguard.co to discuss options.

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SmartScreen warns on the Windows installer

On first run SmartScreen shows “Windows protected your PC” with Unknown publisher. This is expected on every fresh install:
  1. Click More info.
  2. Click Run anyway.
Why you see this. Windows shows that screen for any installer whose publisher it does not recognise. PromptGuard Shadow is distributed from promptguard.co rather than the Microsoft Store and its Windows build is not code-signed, so the screen appears every time — it does not mean the file was tampered with. Only ever download the installer from promptguard.co/download; if you got it from anywhere else, delete it and re-download. If your organisation’s endpoint policy (AppLocker, WDAC, Intune) refuses to run unsigned executables at all, contact support@promptguard.co — that is the one case we revisit signing for.

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Where logs and config live

The agent keeps its state in one directory on every platform: Inside it: config.json (credentials — never share this file), pgshadow-proxy.log (the proxy log, useful for support), and events.db (the local, PII-redacted event log).

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Collecting logs for support

When you open a ticket, include the output of:
These report proxy, certificate, and engine health without exposing prompt content — the local event log is PII-redacted. Attach pgshadow-proxy.log from the directory above if asked (never config.json — it holds your device credential). Send it all to support@promptguard.co.

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Next steps

Known limitations

What’s out of scope and why.

Privacy & data handling

What the agent logs and what reaches the cloud.