Resource Manager audit logging

This document describes the audit logs created by Resource Manager as part of Cloud Audit Logs.

Overview

Google Cloud services write audit logs to help you answer the questions, "Who did what, where, and when?" within your Google Cloud resources.

Your Google Cloud projects contain only the audit logs for resources that are directly within the Google Cloud project. Other Google Cloud resources, such as folders, organizations, and billing accounts, contain the audit logs for the entity itself.

For a general overview of Cloud Audit Logs, see Cloud Audit Logs overview. For a deeper understanding of the audit log format, see Understand audit logs.

Available audit logs

The following types of audit logs are available for Resource Manager:

• Admin Activity audit logs

  Includes "admin write" operations that write metadata or configuration information.

  You can't disable Admin Activity audit logs.

• Data Access audit logs

  Includes "admin read" operations that read metadata or configuration information. Also includes "data read" and "data write" operations that read or write user-provided data.

  To receive Data Access audit logs, you must explicitly enable them.

For fuller descriptions of the audit log types, see Types of audit logs.

Audited operations

The following table summarizes which API operations correspond to each audit log type in Resource Manager:

The audit logs for tags operations in other services, such as cloudsql.instances.listEffectiveTags, are written to the resource's parent and are included in Resource Manager audit logs. They are not included in the service resource's audit logs. To see these logs, you must enable ADMIN_READ under the service for the particular resource to which the tag is attached.

The GetContactInfo and UpdateContactInfo operations support the ContactInfo service for the EU General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR). These operations update and retrieve contact information for an EU Representative and a Data Protections Officer, which can be modified in the Google Cloud console on the Google Cloud Privacy & Security page.

Audit log format

Audit log entries include the following objects:

• The log entry itself, which is an object of type LogEntry. Useful fields include the following:

  • The logName contains the resource ID and audit log type. The resource is a project, folder, organization, or billing account.
  • The resource contains the target of the audited operation.
  • The timeStamp contains the time of the audited operation.
  • The protoPayload contains the audited information.

• The audit logging data, which is an AuditLog object held in the protoPayload field of the log entry.

  • The @type field is set to "type.googleapis.com/google.cloud.audit.AuditLog".
  • The serviceName field identifies the service that wrote the audit log. The format of this field is service specific.

• Optional service-specific audit information, which is a service-specific object. For earlier integrations, this object is held in the serviceData field of the AuditLog object; later integrations use the metadata field.

For other fields in these objects, and how to interpret them, review Understand audit logs.

Log name

Cloud Audit Logs log names include resource identifiers indicating the Google Cloud project or other Google Cloud entity that owns the audit logs, and whether the log contains Admin Activity, Data Access, Policy Denied, or System Event audit logging data.

The following are the audit log names, including variables for the resource identifiers:

   projects/PROJECT_ID/logs/cloudaudit.googleapis.com%2Factivity
   projects/PROJECT_ID/logs/cloudaudit.googleapis.com%2Fdata_access
   projects/PROJECT_ID/logs/cloudaudit.googleapis.com%2Fsystem_event
   projects/PROJECT_ID/logs/cloudaudit.googleapis.com%2Fpolicy

   folders/FOLDER_ID/logs/cloudaudit.googleapis.com%2Factivity
   folders/FOLDER_ID/logs/cloudaudit.googleapis.com%2Fdata_access
   folders/FOLDER_ID/logs/cloudaudit.googleapis.com%2Fsystem_event
   folders/FOLDER_ID/logs/cloudaudit.googleapis.com%2Fpolicy

   billingAccounts/BILLING_ACCOUNT_ID/logs/cloudaudit.googleapis.com%2Factivity
   billingAccounts/BILLING_ACCOUNT_ID/logs/cloudaudit.googleapis.com%2Fdata_access
   billingAccounts/BILLING_ACCOUNT_ID/logs/cloudaudit.googleapis.com%2Fsystem_event
   billingAccounts/BILLING_ACCOUNT_ID/logs/cloudaudit.googleapis.com%2Fpolicy

   organizations/ORGANIZATION_ID/logs/cloudaudit.googleapis.com%2Factivity
   organizations/ORGANIZATION_ID/logs/cloudaudit.googleapis.com%2Fdata_access
   organizations/ORGANIZATION_ID/logs/cloudaudit.googleapis.com%2Fsystem_event
   organizations/ORGANIZATION_ID/logs/cloudaudit.googleapis.com%2Fpolicy

Service name

Resource Manager audit logs use the service name cloudresourcemanager.googleapis.com.

For a list of all the Cloud Logging API service names and their corresponding monitored resource type, see Map services to resources.

Resource types

Resource Manager audit logs use the resource type project for all audit logs.

For a list of all the Cloud Logging monitored resource types and descriptive information, see Monitored resource types.

Caller identities

The IP address of the caller is held in the RequestMetadata.caller_ip field of the AuditLog object. Logging might redact certain caller identities and IP addresses.

For information about what information is redacted in audit logs, see Caller identities in audit logs.

Enable audit logging

Admin Activity audit logs are always enabled; you can't disable them.

Data Access audit logs are disabled by default and aren't written unless explicitly enabled (the exception is Data Access audit logs for BigQuery, which can't be disabled).

For information about enabling some or all of your Data Access audit logs, see Enable Data Access audit logs.

Permissions and roles

IAM permissions and roles determine your ability to access audit logs data in Google Cloud resources.

When deciding which Logging-specific permissions and roles apply to your use case, consider the following:

• The Logs Viewer role (roles/logging.viewer) gives you read-only access to Admin Activity, Policy Denied, and System Event audit logs. If you have just this role, you cannot view Data Access audit logs that are in the _Default bucket.

• The Private Logs Viewer role(roles/logging.privateLogViewer) includes the permissions contained in roles/logging.viewer, plus the ability to read Data Access audit logs in the _Default bucket.

  Note that if these private logs are stored in user-defined buckets, then any user who has permissions to read logs in those buckets can read the private logs. For more information about log buckets, see Routing and storage overview.

For more information about the IAM permissions and roles that apply to audit logs data, see Access control with IAM.

View logs

You can query for all audit logs or you can query for logs by their audit log name. The audit log name includes the resource identifier of the Google Cloud project, folder, billing account, or organization for which you want to view audit logging information. Your queries can specify indexed LogEntry fields. For more information about querying your logs, see Build queries in the Logs Explorer

The Logs Explorer lets you view filter individual log entries. If you want to use SQL to analyze groups of log entries, then use the Log Analytics page. For more information, see:

• Query and view logs in Observability Analytics.
• Sample queries for security insights.
• Chart query results.

Most audit logs can be viewed in Cloud Logging by using the Google Cloud console, the Google Cloud CLI, or the Logging API. However, for audit logs related to billing, you can only use the Google Cloud CLI or the Logging API.