Guide to Building Audit Logs for Application Software

<p>It&rsquo;s 2023 and audit logs are a core component of any enterprise product offering. As simple as they seem, audit logs can be tricky to implement.</p> <p>Having made this feature twice as part of my work at&nbsp;<a href="https://github.com/Infisical/infisical" rel="noopener ugc nofollow" target="_blank">Infisical</a>, I discuss everything about audit logging in this article and specifically how to ship them properly for yourself.</p> <h1>What are audit logs?</h1> <p>To begin, audit logs are a centralized stream of user activity used by security and compliance teams at enterprises to monitor information access in the event of any suspicious activity or incident review. At first glance, they are entries consisting of events, time-stamps, and payloads. On a deeper level, however, they can be seen as summaries that, when taken in tandem, capture a frame-by-frame narrative of what happened at any given period of time in great detail (we call this a fine-grain audit trail).</p> <h1>Making great audit logs</h1> <p>In this section, we outline the data structure we&rsquo;d expect from an audit log and the principles we wish to uphold.</p> <h2>The general data structure</h2> <p>As a reminder, audit logs are purpose-built for security and compliance teams to monitor and inspect the context of an incident at a given point in time. Given this, a good set of audit logs should, at the every least, contain fields that answer your basic interrogative pronouns:</p> <p><a href="https://medium.com/@tony.infisical/guide-to-building-audit-logs-for-application-software-b0083bb58604">Website</a></p>