10. Audit

The systems provides a sophisticated audit log, that can be viewed in the WebUI.

../_images/auditlog.png

Audit Log

privacyIDEA comes with an SQL audit module. (see Audit log)

10.1. Cleaning up entries

The sqlaudit module writes audit entries to an SQL database. For performance reasons the audit module does no log rotation during the logging process.

But you can set up a cron job to clean up old audit entries. Since version 2.19 audit entries can be either cleaned up based on the number of entries or based on on the age.

Cleaning based on the age takes precedence:

You can specify a highwatermark and a lowwatermark. To clean up the audit log table, you can call pi-manage at command line:

pi-manage rotate_audit --highwatermark 20000 --lowwatermark 18000

This will, if there are more than 20.000 log entries, clean all old log entries, so that only 18000 log entries remain.

Cleaning based on the age:

You can specify the number of days, how old an audit entry may be at a max.

pi-manage rotate_audit –age 365

will delete all audit entries that are older than one year.

10.1.1. Access rights

You may also want to run the cron job with reduced rights. I.e. a user who has no read access to the original pi.cfg file, since this job does not need read access to the SECRET or PEPPER in the pi.cfg file.

So you can simply specify a config file with only the content:

PI_AUDIT_SQL_URI = <your database uri>

Then you can call pi-manage like this:

PRIVACYIDEA_CONFIGFILE=/home/cornelius/src/privacyidea/audit.cfg \
pi-manage rotate_audit

This will read the configuration (only the database uri) from the config file audit.cfg.

10.1.2. Table size

Sometimes the entires to be written to the database may be longer than the column in the database. You can either enlarge the columns in the database or you can set

PI_AUDIT_SQL_TRUNCATE = True

in pi.cfg. This will truncate each entry to the defined column length.