Cloud Audit Logs

Cloud Audit Logs maintains three audit logs for each project, folder, and organization: Admin Activity, Data Access, and System Event. Google Cloud Platform services write audit log entries to these logs to help you answer the questions of "who did what, where, and when?" within your GCP projects.

For a list of GCP services that provide audit logs, go to Services producing audit logs. All GCP services will eventually provide audit logs.

Admin Activity audit logs

Admin Activity audit logs contain log entries for API calls or other administrative actions that modify the configuration or metadata of resources. For example, these logs record when users create VM instances or change Cloud Identity and Access Management permissions.

To view these logs, you must have the Cloud IAM role Logging/Logs Viewer or Project/Viewer.

Admin Activity audit logs are always enabled. There is no charge for your Admin Activity audit logs. For details on logging usage limits, go to Quotas and limits.

Data Access audit logs

Data Access audit logs contain API calls that read the configuration or metadata of resources, as well as user-driven API calls that create, modify, or read user-provided resource data. Data Access audit logs do not record the data-access operations on resources that are publicly shared (available to All Users or All Authenticated Users) or that can be accessed without logging into GCP.

To view these logs, you must have the Cloud IAM roles Logging/Private Logs Viewer or Project/Owner.

Data Access audit logs are disabled by default because they can be quite large; they must be explicitly enabled to be written. Enabling the logs might result in your project being charged for the additional logs usage. For instructions on enabling and configuring Data Access audit logs, go to Configuring Data Access logs.

BigQuery Data Access audit logs are handled differently from other Data Access audit logs. BigQuery audit logs are always written and cannot be disabled. They do not count against your logs quotas and are free.

For details on logging usage limits, go to Quotas and limits. For details on costs you might incur, go to Pricing.

System Event audit logs

System Event audit logs contain log entries for GCP administrative actions that modify the configuration of resources. System Event audit logs are generated by Google systems; they are not driven by direct user action.

To view these logs, you must have the Cloud IAM role Logging/Logs Viewer or Project/Viewer.

System Event audit logs are always enabled. There is no charge for your System Event audit logs. For details on logging usage limits, go to Quotas and limits.

Audit log entry structure

Every audit log entry in Stackdriver Logging is an object of type LogEntry that is characterized by the following information:

• The project or organization that owns the log entry.
• The resource to which the log entry applies. This consists of a resource type from the Monitored Resource List and additional values that denote a specific instance.
• A log name.
• A timestamp.
• A payload, which is the protoPayload type. The payload of each audit log entry is an object of type AuditLog, a protocol buffer, and contains a field, serviceData, that some services use to hold additional information.

All audit log entries contain the name of an audit log, a resource, and a service. You can use these names to filter audit log entries:

• Log name: Audit log entries belong to logs within projects, folders, and organizations. The log names are listed below:

   projects/[PROJECT_ID]/logs/cloudaudit.googleapis.com%2Factivity
   projects/[PROJECT_ID]/logs/cloudaudit.googleapis.com%2Fdata_access

   folders/[FOLDER_ID]/logs/cloudaudit.googleapis.com%2Factivity
   folders/[FOLDER_ID]/logs/cloudaudit.googleapis.com%2Fdata_access
   folders/[FOLDER_ID]/logs/cloudaudit.googleapis.com%2Fsystem_event

   organizations/[ORGANIZATION_ID]/logs/cloudaudit.googleapis.com%2Factivity
   organizations/[ORGANIZATION_ID]/logs/cloudaudit.googleapis.com%2Fdata_access
   organizations/[ORGANIZATION_ID]/logs/cloudaudit.googleapis.com%2Fsystem_event

Within a project, folder, or organization, these log names are typically abbreviated activity, data_access, and system_event.

• Resource: Each audit log entry includes a resource of some type. For example, you can view audit log entries from a single Compute Engine VM instance or from all VM instances. This information is listed in the resource.type field of the audit log entry.

  For the list of resource types, go to Monitored resource types.

• Service: Services are individual GCP products, such as Compute Engine, Cloud SQL, or Cloud Pub/Sub. Each service is identified by name: Compute Engine is compute.googleapis.com, Cloud SQL is cloudsql.googleapis.com, and so forth. This information is listed in the protoPayload.serviceName field of the audit log entry.

  Resource types belongs to a single service, but a service can have several resource types. For a list of services and resources, go to Mapping services to resources.

For more details, go to Audit Log Datatypes.

To understand how to read and interpret audit log entries, review Understanding audit logs.

Viewing audit logs

You have several options for viewing your audit log entries:

gcloud logging read "logName=(projects/[PROJECT_ID]/logs/cloudaudit.googleapis.com%2Factivity OR projects/[PROJECT_ID]/logs/cloudaudit.googleapis.com%2Fsystem_events OR projects/[PROJECT_ID]/logs/cloudaudit.googleapis.com%2Fdata_access)

Using the Activity page

You can view abbreviated, project-level audit log entries in your project's Activity page in the GCP Console. Go to the page Home > Activity. Use Filter to select the entries you want to view. The actual audit log entries might contain more information than appears in the Activity page.

Go to the Activity page

In the Activity page, where the identity performing logged actions is redacted from the audit log entry, User (anonymized) is displayed. For more details, go to User identities in audit logs.

Exporting audit logs

You can export audit log entries to Stackdriver Logging or to certain GCP services.

To export audit log entries outside of Logging, create a logs sink. Give the sink a filter that specifies the audit log types you want to export; for filter examples, go to Security logging filters.

If you want to export audit log entries for a GCP organization, folder, or billing account, review Aggregated exports.

Audit log retention

Individual audit log entries are kept for a specified length of time and are then deleted. For details on how long log entries are retained by Logging, review the retention information in Quotas and limits. You cannot otherwise delete or modify audit logs or their entries.

For longer retention, you can export audit log entries like any other Logging log entries and keep them for as long as you wish.

User identities in audit logs

Audit logs record the identity that performed the logged actions. The identity is held in the AuthenticationInfo field of AuditLog objects.

In the following circumstances, the identity is unavailable or is redacted:

• All audit logs: For privacy reasons, the principal email address is redacted for all read-only operations that fail with a "permission denied" error.

• App Engine: Identities are not collected from the legacy App Engine API.

• BigQuery: Identities and caller IP addresses are currently redacted from the audit logs, unless at least one of the following conditions are met:

  • This is not a read-only access.
  • The identity is a service account that belongs to the project.
  • The identity is a member of the domain associated with the project.

  Project domain in this context is a BigQuery setting. If you would like to change the domain associated with your project, contact BigQuery support.

  There are additional rules that apply for cross-project access:

  Here, the billing project is the project issuing the request, and the data project is the project whose resources are also accessed during the job. An example is query job in a billing project that reads some table data from the data project.

  The billing project resource ID will be redacted from the data project log unless the projects have the same domain associated with them or are in the same organization.

  Identities and caller IP addresses will be redacted from the data project log unless one of the conditions above apply, or:

  • Billing project and data project have the same domain associated with them or are in the same organization, and billing project already includes the identity and caller IP address.
  • The identity has permission to run queries in the project and the action is a job.insert action.

If you are viewing audit logs using the Google Cloud Platform Console Activity page, User (anonymized) is displayed for any log entries where identity is redacted or empty.

Google services producing audit logs

The tables below list the Google services that write Admin Activity or Data Access audit logs. GA indicates that a log type is Generally Available for a service; Beta indicates that a log type is available, but might be changed in backward-incompatible ways and is not subject to any SLA or deprecation policy.

GCP services producing audit logs

G Suite services producing audit logs

The G Suite audit log name is organizations/[ORGANIZATION_ID]/logs/cloudaudit.googleapis.com%2Factivity. G Suite audit logs use the resource type audited_resource.

For additional context, review the G Suite Admin Help article.

¹: This service does not produce Data Access audit logs.
²: BigQuery Data Access audit logs are enabled by default and do not count against your logs allotment.
³: This service does not produce Admin Activity audit logs.
⁴: Audits OAuth 2.0 client IDs and brands.
⁵: Does not yet include request/response information.
⁶: Audits requests to start managed import or export operations. Audit does not include entity-specific read/write logs for those operations.
⁷: Compute Engine also generates System Event audit logs.