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Auditing Self-Managed Deployments

On this page

  • Enable and Configure Audit Output
  • Audit Events and Filter
  • Audit Guarantee

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 for mongod and mongos instances. The auditing facility allows administrators and users to track system activity for deployments with multiple users and applications.

Enable and Configure Audit Output

The auditing facility can write audit events to the console, the syslog, 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 on Self-Managed Deployments.

For information on the audit log messages, see System Event Audit Messages in Self-Managed Deployments.

Audit Events and Filter

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

  • schema (DDL),

  • replica set and sharded cluster,

  • authentication and authorization, and

  • CRUD operations (requires auditAuthorizationSuccess set to true).

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 Audit Event Actions, Details, and Results.

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

[1] Operations in an aborted transaction still generate audit events. However, there is no audit event that indicates that the transaction aborted.

Audit Guarantee

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 the journal 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.

These auditing guarantees require that MongoDB run with journaling enabled.

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 the audit destination, the server will terminate.

[2] Audit configuration can include a filter to limit events to audit.

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