Enabling audit logging
editEnabling audit logging
editYou can log security-related events such as authentication failures and refused connections to monitor your cluster for suspicious activity (including data access authorization and user security configuration changes).
Audit logging also provides forensic evidence in the event of an attack.
Audit logs are disabled by default. You must explicitly enable audit logging.
Audit logs are only available on certain subscription levels. For more information, see https://www.elastic.co/subscriptions.
To enable audit logging:
-
Set
xpack.security.audit.enabledtotrueinelasticsearch.yml. - Restart Elasticsearch.
When audit logging is enabled, security events are persisted to
a dedicated <clustername>_audit.json file on the host’s file system, on every cluster node.
For more information, see Logfile audit output.
You can configure additional options to control what events are logged and what information is included in the audit log. For more information, see Auditing settings.