TL;DR

lakeFS Cloud offers Audit Logs for compliance, operational stability,  monitoring access, activities and security analysis. 

In the latest version of lakeFS Cloud, we introduced our new Audit Logs feature, providing detailed information on all user actions across all regions.

Audit Logs – what is it and why should you care?

Using the lakeFS Audit Logs, you can view all relevant user actions, including when, by whom, and what they did, in a clear and organized way.

The icing on the cake for the new Audit Logs is the super convenient search bar where you can filter with a simple query language. For example, let’s say you want to see all the actions done by your test users whose names end with `-testing` in the us-east-1 region that got unexpected status codes, all you need to do is write the following search command:

Use cases for Audit Logs

Offering visibility through the Audit Logs into lakeFS operations such as data access, user management, and versioning operations can be useful in several ways, including: 

1. Compliance

One important aspect of compliance is accountability, which audit logs provide through the ability to detect unauthorized activities. Not only can you use the audit logs to see what users did in the user management aspect (i.e. provide permissions for users or groups), you could also use the audit logs to investigate what data your users tried to access, and when.

 2. Operation stability

With these auditing capabilities, you can identify and troubleshoot data changes. For example, if big files suddenly broke into thousands of smaller files and you want to find the root cause of this behavior change in your data, you could use our audit log to trace the actions that led to the change. 

3. Security analysis

One of the most important uses for an audit log is to be able to see what a user has done on the system. A key example of this is if credentials are compromised and you want to see what they have been used for on the system. Using the lakeFS Audit Log, you can see what files were accessed or modified, as well as any user account modifications such as creating a new rogue user on the system. 

What’s next?

Now that all lakeFS operations are audited, several of you suggested additional operational functionalities on top of those. For example, stream the actions to a monitoring platform and automatically alert in cases of failure on a specific dataset. Stay tuned for more and let us know what you think! 

To sum up

Audit Logs enables you operational, governance and security features which are critical for your data system to be compliant.

To start taking advantage of the Audit Log, log into your lakefs.cloud account and navigate to the Audit Logs page. If you don’t have a cloud account yet, you can easily start a new trial and begin using the feature right away.