Audit Logs

Audit logs maintain a historical record of activity events, noting the time, responsible user or service, and affected entity.

Audit logs enable organizations to meet certain compliance and business policy requirements. Additionally, Administrators use audit logs to track user activity, and security teams use them to investigate breaches and ensure regulatory compliance.

Key Features

  • The audit logs are structured in JSON format, ensuring machine-readability.

  • This format facilitates easy integration with third-party tools.

  • It eliminates the need for users to navigate through numerous log files.

Considerations

Security

  • Like other gadmin configurations, only the Linux user with server access can enable and configure the audit log.

  • Access to the audit log is restricted to those who have access to TigerGraph logs.

  • Sensitive data or PII in the audit log, such as credentials or sensitive query payload information is masked by default.

Performance and Scalability

  • Enabling audit logging records audit logs to separate files, adding a slight disk I/O workload. However, compared to the debug log, the audit log contains significantly less data, ensuring negligible performance impact.

Configuration Commands

Table 1. Users can enable, disable, and configure audit logging with the following gadmin configs:
Configuration Description Type (Default Value)

System.Audit.Enable

Setting to enable audit logs.

boolean (false)

System.Audit.DataBaseName

Modify the DataBaseName field in log file header.

name (TigerGraph)

System.Audit.LogDirRelativePath

Modify the relative audit log path.

path string (<TG_LogRoot>/AuditLog/)

System.Audit.LogConfig.LogFileMaxDurationDay

Modify the modification date when a new audit log file is created.

Integer (90)

System.Audit.LogConfig.LogFileMaxSizeMB

Modify the audit log file’s max size.

Integer (100)

System.Audit.LogConfig.LogRotationFileNumber

Modify the max amount of Audit Log files in the Audit Log folder.

Integer (100)

System.Audit.MaskPII

Mask Sensitive data or PII in the audit log.

Default value is: true

Additionally, all audit log files are stored in JSON format. Each log entry is a JSON object, and the log file is one JSON array of these objects.

For more information see section Consuming Audit Logs or for a complete list of TigerGraph gadmin configs see Configuration Parameters.

Apply Configuration Changes

If you use gadmin config to change any of these parameters, you need to run gadmin config apply -y for it to take effect. You can change multiple parameters and then run gadmin config apply for all of them together

After modifying the configurations, run the following command to apply the changes:
$ gadmin config apply -y
$ gadmin restart gsql -y

Setup Environment

Audit logging is disabled by default in a TigerGraph system.

To enable audit logging, use gadmin to run the following command to enable the setting:
$ gadmin config set System.Audit.Enable true

Once enabled, the audit log will be found in the <System.LogRoot>/AuditLog folder. The <System.LogRoot> represents the default path for all TigerGraph logs, set to tigergraph/log by default.

To customize the relative path for the audit log (in relation to <System.LogRoot>), execute the following command:
$ gadmin config set System.Audit.LogDirRelativePath <audit-log-relative-path>
You can also modify the <System.LogRoot> on your environment by:
$ gadmin config set System.LogRoot <log-root-path>

Take note that altering <System.LogRoot> impacts the root path for all TigerGraph logs.

Log File Policy

A new audit log file will be created when any of the following situations occur:

  • The GSQL service is restarted.

  • The latest audit log file size exceeds the System.Audit.LogConfig.LogFileMaxSizeMB value. The value of this field is 100MB by default.

    You can modify this value by running the following command:
    $ gadmin config set System.Audit.LogConfig.LogFileMaxSizeMB <file-size>

  • Log files will be removed if its lifetime exceeds System.Audit.LogConfig.LogFileMaxDurationDay. The value of this field is 90 days by default.

    You can modify this value by running the following command:
    $ gadmin config set System.Audit.LogConfig.LogFileMaxDurationDay <max-duration-day>

  • Lastly, the oldest audit log file will be automatically deleted, if the amount of audit logs in the audit log folder exceeds the System.Audit.LogConfig.LogRotationFileNumber value. The default of this value is 100 audit logs.

    You can modify this value by running the following command:
    $ gadmin config set System.Audit.LogConfig.LogRotationFileNumber <file-number>

Other Customizable Configs

There is a “DatabaseName” field appended to the header of each audit log file. The value of this field is "TigerGraph" by default.

You can modify this value by running the following command:
$ gadmin config set System.Audit.DataBaseName <database-name>

Consuming Audit Logs

Log Format

All audit log files are stored in JSON format, even when users are actively interacting with TigerGraph, so audit logs can be consumed at run time.

Audit log files are separated by GSQL service and REST++ API calls. Both having separate file names:

  • log.AUDIT-GSQL for the GSQL service.

  • log.Audit-RESTPP for direct REST++ API calls.
Here is an example of a whole audit log file:
[
    {"serverHostIP":"127.0.0.1","databaseName":"TigerGraph","version":"1.0","timestamp":"2023-12-20T14:42:50.243-07:00"},
    {"endpoint":"/gsql/file","clientHost":"127.0.0.1:43746","clientOSUsername":"tigergraph","userAgent":"GSQL Shell","userName":"tigergraph","authType":"USER_PASS","message":"Successfully created user 'u1'.","timestamp":"2023-12-20T14:42:50.243-07:00","actionName":"createUser","status":“SUCCESS”},
    {"endpoint":"/gsql/file","clientHost":"127.0.0.1:54746","clientOSUsername":"tigergraph","userAgent":"GSQL Shell","userName":"tigergraph","authType":"USER_PASS","message":"Successfully created query 'printVertex'.","timestamp":"2023-12-20T14:42:50.243-07:00","actionName":"createQuery","status":“SUCCESS”},
    {"endpoint":"/gsql/library","clientHost":"127.0.0.1:54770","clientOSUsername":"tigergraph",,"userName":"tigergraph","authType":"USER_PASS","message":"callTemplateQuery succeed","timestamp":"2023-12-20T14:42:50.243-07:00","actionName":"callTemplateQuery","status":“SUCCESS”}
]

  • Each audit log file is a JSON array of JSON objects, one object per log entry.

  • Each object is formatted as a single line for better readability of high volume data.

GSQL Service Audit Logs

The first JSON object is the header of this file, which consists of the following fields:
{
    "version": "1.0",
    "timestamp":"2023-12-20T14:42:50.243-07:00",
    "dataBaseName": "TigerGraph",
    "serverHostIP": "192.168.1.1",
}

The audit log will record any user-triggered activity, such as:

  • login,

  • Password change,

  • grant role,

  • create a query,

  • etc…​

Each activity will have its own audit log entry and fields.
The createQuery activity will produce an audit log entry with the following fields:
{
    "timestamp":"2023-12-20T14:42:50.243-07:00",
    "userName": "tigergraph",
    "authType": "password",
    "clientHost": "<IP or FQDN>:<Port>",
    "clientOSUsername":"OSusername",
    "userAgent": "GSQL Shell",
    "endpoint": "/gsql/file",
    "actionName": "createQuery",
    "status": “SUCCESS”,
    "message": "Successfully created query 'query_name'"
}

For user login/auth related activities, one more field called failedAttempts is added to the JSON. This field indicates how many times this user failed to provide the correct credentials.

Here is an example for user login event:
{
    "timestamp": "2023-12-20T14:42:50.243-07:00",
    "userName": "tigergraph",
    "authType": "SAML SSO",
    "clientHost": "<IP or FQDN>:<Port>",
    "clientOSUsername":"tigergraph",
    "userAgent": "GraphStudio",
    "endpoint": "/gsql/simpleauth",
    "actionName": "login",
    "failedAttempts" : 1,
    "status" : "FAILURE",
    "message": "Username doesn't exist"
}

REST++ API Call Audit Logs

Audit logs for REST++ calls are found in the log.Audit-RESTPP file. They are similar to GSQL service audit logs, such as, the status for API calls will be either SUCCESS or FAILURE, but they are different in these ways:

  • The duration is the runtime cost with seconds.

  • The code will be the return codes from the REST++ server, see Return Codes.

  • A new field requestId is also added.

Values in requestParams and requestBody will be masked if they contain PII data.

Here is an example of the REST++ call event:
{
  "timestamp": "2023-10-02T15:06:18.365Z",
  "userName": "tigergraph",
  "authType": "token",
  "clientHost": "<IP or FQDN>:<Port>",
  "userAgent": "curl",
  "endpoint": "/restpp/query/{graph_name}/{query_name}",
  "actionName": "runQuery",
  "status": "SUCCESS",
  "duration": 3.24,
  "requestId": "16842763.RESTPP_1_1.1561401340785.N",
  "requestParams": "",
  "requestBody": "",
  "code": "REST-0000",
  "message": "<success/error message>"
}

Known Issues

  • The real client IP address could be removed or masked by a firewall or another intermediate redirect layer before arriving at the TigerGraph service.

    • Thus, TigerGraph cannot get the actual client ip, instead it will put the ip address of the last layer who forwarded the request to TigerGraph service in the audit log.

  • Even when REST++ authentication is enabled and when a request that failed due to an invalid request parameter, the username in the corresponding audit log will be marked as unknown instead of the actual username.

    • This is because request parameter validation happens before token validation. Thus, REST++ calls do not know the username before it gets printed in the audit log.

  • If the user logs into TG Cloud using SSO, they will not be required to provide credentials again when opening GraphStudio.

    • Therefore, the login event would not be reflected in the audit log, but the user’s subsequent operations (create query, install query, etc.) will be recorded in the audit log as normal.