Reviewing the audit log for your organization - GitHub Docs (original) (raw)

The audit log allows organization admins to quickly review the actions performed by members of your organization. It includes details such as who performed the action, what the action was, and when it was performed.

Accessing the audit log

Note

Webhooks might be a good alternative to the audit log or API polling for certain use cases. Webhooks are a way for GitHub to notify your server when specific events occur for a repository, organization, or enterprise. Compared to the API or searching the audit log, webhooks can be more efficient if you just want to learn and possibly log when certain events occur on your enterprise, organization, or repository. See Webhooks documentation.

The audit log lists events triggered by activities that affect your organization within the last 180 days. Only owners can access an organization's audit log.

By default, only events from the past three months are displayed. To view older events, you must specify a date range with the created parameter. See Understanding the search syntax.

1. In the upper-right corner of GitHub, click your profile picture, then click Organizations.
2. Next to the organization, click Settings.
3. In the "Archive" section of the sidebar, click Logs, then click Audit log.

Searching the audit log

The name for each audit log entry is composed of a category of events, followed by an operation type. For example, the repo.create entry refers to the create operation on the repo category.

Each audit log entry shows applicable information about an event, such as:

• The organization an action was performed in
• The user (actor) who performed the action
• The user affected by the action
• Which repository an action was performed in
• The action that was performed
• Which country the action took place in
• The date and time the action occurred

Note that you cannot search for entries using text. You can, however, construct search queries using a variety of filters. Many operators used when querying the log, such as -, >, or <, match the same format as searching across GitHub. For more information, see About searching on GitHub.

Search based on operation

Use the operation qualifier to limit actions to specific types of operations. For example:

• operation:access finds all events where a resource was accessed.
• operation:authentication finds all events where an authentication event was performed.
• operation:create finds all events where a resource was created.
• operation:modify finds all events where an existing resource was modified.
• operation:remove finds all events where an existing resource was removed.
• operation:restore finds all events where an existing resource was restored.
• operation:transfer finds all events where an existing resource was transferred.

Search based on repository

Use the repo qualifier to limit actions to a specific repository. For example:

• repo:my-org/our-repo finds all events that occurred for the our-repo repository in the my-org organization.
• repo:my-org/our-repo repo:my-org/another-repo finds all events that occurred for both the our-repo and another-repo repositories in the my-org organization.
• -repo:my-org/not-this-repo excludes all events that occurred for the not-this-repo repository in the my-org organization.

Note that you must include the account name within the repo qualifier; searching for just repo:our-repo will not work.

Search based on the user

The actor qualifier can scope events based on who performed the action. For example:

• actor:octocat finds all events performed by octocat.
• actor:octocat actor:hubot finds all events performed by octocat or hubot.
• -actor:hubot excludes all events performed by hubot.

Note that you can only use a GitHub username, not an individual's real name.

Search based on the action performed

To search for specific events, use the action qualifier in your query. Actions listed in the audit log are grouped in different categories. For the full list of events in each category, see Audit log events for your organization.

You can search for specific sets of actions using these terms. For example:

• action:team finds all events grouped within the team category.
• -action:hook excludes all events in the webhook category.

Each category has a set of associated actions that you can filter on. For example:

• action:team.create finds all events where a team was created.
• -action:hook.events_changed excludes all events where the events on a webhook have been altered.

Search based on time of action

Use the created qualifier to filter events in the audit log based on when they occurred. Date formatting must follow the ISO8601 standard, which is YYYY-MM-DD (year-month-day). You can also add optional time information THH:MM:SS+00:00 after the date, to search by the hour, minute, and second. That's T, followed by HH:MM:SS (hour-minutes-seconds), and a UTC offset (+00:00).

When you search for a date, you can use greater than, less than, and range qualifiers to further filter results. For more information, see Understanding the search syntax.

For example:

• created:2014-07-08 finds all events that occurred on July 8th, 2014.
• created:>=2014-07-08 finds all events that occurred on or after July 8th, 2014.
• created:<=2014-07-08 finds all events that occurred on or before July 8th, 2014.
• created:2014-07-01..2014-07-31 finds all events that occurred in the month of July 2014.

Note

The audit log contains data for the last 180 days.

Search based on location

Using the qualifier country, you can filter events in the audit log based on the originating country. You can use a country's two-letter short code or its full name. Keep in mind that countries with spaces in their name will need to be wrapped in quotation marks. For example:

• country:de finds all events that occurred in Germany.
• country:Mexico finds all events that occurred in Mexico.
• country:"United States" all finds events that occurred in the United States.

Exporting the audit log

You can export the log as JSON data or a comma-separated value (CSV) file with the Export dropdown menu.

To filter the results in your export, search by one or more of these supported qualifiers before using the Export dropdown menu.

After you export the log, you'll see the following keys and values in the resulting file.

Using the audit log API

Organizations that use GitHub Enterprise Cloud can interact with the audit log using the GraphQL API and REST API. For more information, see the GitHub Enterprise Cloud documentation.

Further reading

• Keeping your organization secure
• Exporting member information for your organization