Auditing (original) (raw)

Note

Auditing in MongoDB Atlas

MongoDB Atlas supports auditing for M10 and larger clusters. To learn more, see Set Up Database Auditing in the MongoDB Atlas documentation.

MongoDB Enterprise includes an auditing capability formongod and mongos instances. The auditing facility allows administrators and users to track system activity for deployments with multiple users and applications.

The auditing facility can write audit events to the console, thesyslog, a JSON file, or a BSON file. To enable auditing in MongoDB Enterprise, set an audit output destination with--auditDestination. For details, see Configure Auditing.

For information on the audit log messages, see System Event Audit Messages.

Once enabled, the auditing system can record the following operations[1]:

Note

Starting in MongoDB 5.0, secondaries do not log DDL audit events for replicated changes. DDL audit events are still logged for DDL operations that modify the local database and the system.profile collection.

For details on audited actions, see System Event Audit Messages.

With the auditing system, you can set up filters to restrict the events captured. To set up filters, see Configure Audit Filters.

The auditing system writes every audit event [2] to an in-memory buffer of audit events. MongoDB writes this buffer to disk periodically. For events collected from any single connection, the events have a total order: if MongoDB writes one event to disk, the system guarantees that it has written all prior events for that connection to disk.

If an audit event entry corresponds to an operation that affects the durable state of the database, such as a modification to data, MongoDB will always write the audit event to disk before writing to thejournal for that entry.

That is, before adding an operation to the journal, MongoDB writes all audit events on the connection that triggered the operation, up to and including the entry for the operation.

Warning

MongoDB may lose events if the server terminates before it commits the events to the audit log. The client may receive confirmation of the event before MongoDB commits to the audit log. For example, while auditing an aggregation operation, the server might terminate after returning the result but before the audit log flushes.

In addition, if the server cannot write to the audit log at theaudit destination, the server will terminate.