Audit event development guidelines
This guide provides an overview of how Audit Events work, and how to instrument new audit events.
What are Audit Events?
Audit Events are a tool for GitLab owners and administrators to view records of important actions performed across the application.
What should not be Audit Events?
While any events could trigger an Audit Event, not all events should. In general, events that are not good candidates for audit events are:
- Not attributable to one specific user.
- Not of specific interest to an administrator or owner persona.
- Are tracking information for product feature adoption.
- Are covered in the direction page’s discussion on what is not planned.
If you have any questions, reach out to @gitlab-org/govern/compliance
to see if an Audit Event, or some other approach, may be best for your event.
Audit Event Schemas
To instrument an audit event, the following attributes should be provided:
Attribute | Type | Required? | Description |
---|---|---|---|
name
| String | false | Action name to be audited. Represents the type of the event. Used for error tracking |
author
| User | true | User who authors the change. Can be an internal user. For example, inactive project deletion audit events are authored by GitLab-Admin-Bot .
|
scope
| User, Project, Group, or InstanceScope | true | Scope which the audit event belongs to |
target
| Object | true | Target object being audited |
message
| String | true | Message describing the action (not translated) |
created_at
| DateTime | false | The time when the action occurred. Defaults to DateTime.current
|
How to instrument new Audit Events
- Create a YAML type definition for the new audit event.
- Call
Gitlab::Audit::Auditor.audit
, passing an action block.
The following ways of instrumenting audit events are deprecated:
- Create a new class in
ee/lib/ee/audit/
and extendAuditEventService
- Call
AuditEventService
after a successful action
With Gitlab::Audit::Auditor
service, we can instrument audit events in two ways:
- Using block for multiple events.
- Using standard method call for single events.
Using block to record multiple events
You can use this method when events are emitted deep in the call stack.
For example, we can record multiple audit events when the user updates a merge
request approval rule. As part of this user flow, we would like to audit changes
to both approvers and approval groups. In the initiating service
(for example, MergeRequestRuleUpdateService
), we can wrap the execute
call as follows:
# in the initiating service
audit_context = {
name: 'update_merge_approval_rule',
author: current_user,
scope: project_alpha,
target: merge_approval_rule,
message: 'Attempted to update an approval rule'
}
::Gitlab::Audit::Auditor.audit(audit_context) do
service.execute
end
In the model (for example, ApprovalProjectRule
), we can push audit events on model
callbacks (for example, after_save
or after_add
).
# in the model
include Auditable
def audit_add(model)
push_audit_event('Added an approver on Security rule')
end
def audit_remove(model)
push_audit_event('Removed an approver on Security rule')
end
This method does not support actions that are asynchronous, or span across multiple processes (for example, background jobs).
Using standard method call to record single event
This method allows recording single audit event and involves fewer moving parts.
if merge_approval_rule.save
audit_context = {
name: 'create_merge_approval_rule',
author: current_user,
scope: project_alpha,
target: merge_approval_rule,
message: 'Created a new approval rule',
created_at: DateTime.current # Useful for pre-dating an audit event when created asynchronously.
}
::Gitlab::Audit::Auditor.audit(audit_context)
end
Data volume considerations
Because every audit event is persisted to the database, consider the amount of data we expect to generate, and the rate of generation, for new
audit events. For new audit events that produce a lot of data in the database, consider adding a
streaming-only audit event instead. If you have questions about this, feel free to ping
@gitlab-org/govern/compliance/backend
in an issue or merge request.
Audit Event instrumentation flows
The two ways we can instrument audit events have different flows.
Using block to record multiple events
We wrap the operation block in a Gitlab::Audit::Auditor
which captures the
initial audit context (that is, author
, scope
, target
) object that are
available at the time the operation is initiated.
Extra instrumentation is required in the interacted classes in the chain with
Auditable
mixin to add audit events to the Audit Event queue via Gitlab::Audit::EventQueue
.
The EventQueue
is stored in a local thread via SafeRequestStore
and then later
extracted when we record an audit event in Gitlab::Audit::Auditor
.
Using standard method call to record single event
This method has a more straight-forward flow, and does not rely on EventQueue
and local thread.
In addition to recording to the database, we also write these events to a log file.
Event type definitions
Introduced in GitLab 15.4.
All new audit events must have a type definition stored in config/audit_events/types/
or ee/config/audit_events/types/
that contains a single source of truth for every auditable event in GitLab.
Add a new audit event type
To add a new audit event type:
- Create the YAML definition. You can either:
- Use the
bin/audit-event-type
CLI to create the YAML definition automatically. - Perform manual steps to create a new file in
config/audit_events/types/
with the filename matching the name of the event type. For example, a definition for the event type triggered when a user is added to a project might be stored inconfig/audit_events/types/project_add_user.yml
.
- Use the
- Add contents to the file that conform to the schema defined in
config/audit_events/types/type_schema.json
. - Ensure that all calls to
Gitlab::Audit::Auditor
use thename
defined in your file.
Schema
Field | Required | Description |
---|---|---|
name
| yes | Unique, lowercase and underscored name describing the type of event. Must match the filename. |
description
| yes | Human-readable description of how this event is triggered |
group
| yes | Name of the group that introduced this audit event. For example, manage::compliance
|
introduced_by_issue
| yes | Issue URL that proposed the addition of this type |
introduced_by_mr
| yes | MR URL that added this new type |
milestone
| yes | Milestone in which this type was added |
saved_to_database
| yes | Indicate whether to persist events to database and JSON logs |
streamed
| yes | Indicate that events should be streamed to external services (if configured) |
Generate documentation
Audit event types documentation is automatically generated and published to the GitLab documentation site.
If you add a new audit event type, run the
gitlab:audit_event_types:compile_docs
Rake task
to update the documentation:
bundle exec rake gitlab:audit_event_types:compile_docs
Run the gitlab:audit_event_types:check_docs
Rake task
to check if the documentation is up-to-date.
Event streaming
All events where the entity is a Group
or Project
are recorded in the audit log, and also streamed to one or more
event streaming destinations. When the entity is a:
-
Group
, events are streamed to the group’s root ancestor’s event streaming destinations. -
Project
, events are streamed to the project’s root ancestor’s event streaming destinations.
You can add streaming-only events that are not stored in the GitLab database. Streaming-only events are primarily intended to be used for actions that generate a large amount of data. See this merge request for an example. This feature is under heavy development. Follow the parent epic for updates on feature development.
I18N and the Audit Event :message
attribute
We intentionally do not translate audit event messages because translated messages would be saved in the database and served to users, regardless of their locale settings.
For example, this could mean that we use the locale for the authenticated user to record an audit event message and stream the message to an external streaming destination in the wrong language for that destination. Users could find that confusing.