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Audit a Grafana instance

Auditing allows you to track important changes to your Grafana instance. By default, audit logs are logged to file but the auditing feature also supports sending logs directly to Loki.

Only API requests or UI actions that trigger an API request generate an audit log.

Audit logs

Audit logs are JSON objects representing user actions like:

• Modifications to resources such as dashboards and data sources.
• A user failing to log in.

Format

Audit logs contain the following fields. The fields followed by * are always available, the others depend on the type of action logged.

The additionalData field can contain the following information:

Recorded actions

The audit logs include records about the following categories of actions. Each action is distinguished by the action and resources[...].type fields in the JSON record.

For example, creating an API key produces an audit log like this:

json Copy

{
  "action": "create",
  "resources": [
    {
      "id": 1,
      "type": "api-key"
    }
  ],
  "timestamp": "2021-11-12T22:12:36.144795692Z",
  "user": {
    "userId": 1,
    "orgId": 1,
    "orgRole": "Admin",
    "username": "admin",
    "isAnonymous": false,
    "authTokenId": 1
  },
  "request": {
    "body": "{\"name\":\"example\",\"role\":\"Viewer\",\"secondsToLive\":null}"
  },
  "result": {
    "statusType": "success",
    "statusCode": 200,
    "responseBody": "{\"id\":1,\"name\":\"example\"}"
  },
  "resources": [
    {
      "id": 1,
      "type": "api-key"
    }
  ],
  "requestUri": "/api/auth/keys",
  "ipAddress": "127.0.0.1:54652",
  "userAgent": "Mozilla/5.0 (X11; Linux x86_64; rv:94.0) Gecko/20100101 Firefox/94.0",
  "grafanaVersion": "8.3.0-pre"
}

Some actions can only be distinguished by their requestUri fields. For those actions, the relevant pattern of the requestUri field is given.

Note that almost all these recorded actions are actions that correspond to API requests or UI actions that trigger an API request. Therefore, the action {"action": "email", "resources": [{"type": "report"}]} corresponds to the action when the user requests a report’s preview to be sent through email, and not the scheduled ones.

Sessions

* Where AUTH-MODULE is the name of the authentication module: grafana, saml, ldap, etc.
** Includes manual log out, token expired/revoked, and SAML Single Logout.

Service accounts

Access control

User management

Team and organization management

* Where TEAM-ID is the ID of the affected team, and GROUP-ID (if present) is the ID of the external group.

Folder and dashboard management

Library elements management

Data sources management

* resources may also contain a third item with "type": set to "user" or "team".

Data source query

Reporting

Annotations, playlists and snapshots management

Provisioning

Plugins management

Miscellaneous

Generic actions

In addition to the actions listed above, any HTTP request (POST, PATCH, PUT, and DELETE) against the API is recorded with one of the following generic actions.

Furthermore, you can also record GET requests. See below how to configure it.

Configuration

Audit logs can be saved into files, sent to a Loki instance or sent to the Grafana default logger. By default, only the file exporter is enabled. You can choose which exporter to use in the configuration file.

Options are file, loki, and logger. Use spaces to separate multiple modes, such as file loki.

By default, when a user creates or updates a dashboard, its content will not appear in the logs as it can significantly increase the size of your logs. If this is important information for you and you can handle the amount of data generated, then you can enable this option in the configuration.

ini Copy

[auditing]
# Enable the auditing feature
enabled = false
# List of enabled loggers
loggers = file
# Keep dashboard content in the logs (request or response fields); this can significantly increase the size of your logs.
log_dashboard_content = false
# Keep requests and responses body; this can significantly increase the size of your logs.
verbose = false
# Write an audit log for every status code.
# By default it only logs the following ones: 2XX, 3XX, 401, 403 and 500.
log_all_status_codes = false
# Maximum response body (in bytes) to be audited; 500KiB by default.
# May help reducing the memory footprint caused by auditing.
max_response_size_bytes = 512000

Each exporter has its own configuration fields.

File exporter

Audit logs are saved into files. You can configure the folder to use to save these files. Logs are rotated when the file size is exceeded and at the start of a new day.

ini Copy

[auditing.logs.file]
# Path to logs folder
path = data/log
# Maximum log files to keep
max_files = 5
# Max size in megabytes per log file
max_file_size_mb = 256

Loki exporter

Audit logs are sent to a Loki service, through HTTP or gRPC.

ini Copy

[auditing.logs.loki]
# Set the communication protocol to use with Loki (can be grpc or http)
type = grpc
# Set the address for writing logs to Loki
url = localhost:9095
# Defaults to true. If true, it establishes a secure connection to Loki
tls = true
# Set the tenant ID for Loki communication, which is disabled by default.
# The tenant ID is required to interact with Loki running in multi-tenant mode.
tenant_id =

If you have multiple Grafana instances sending logs to the same Loki service or if you are using Loki for non-audit logs, audit logs come with additional labels to help identifying them:

• host - OS hostname on which the Grafana instance is running.
• grafana_instance - Application URL.
• kind - auditing

When basic authentication is needed to ingest logs in your Loki instance, you can specify credentials in the URL field. For example:

ini Copy

# Set the communication protocol to use with Loki (can be grpc or http)
type = http
# Set the address for writing logs to Loki
url = user:password@localhost:3000

Console exporter

Audit logs are sent to the Grafana default logger. The audit logs use the auditing.console logger and are logged on debug-level, learn how to enable debug logging in the log configuration section of the documentation. Accessing the audit logs in this way is not recommended for production use.