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ScyllaDB Auditing Guide¶

ScyllaDB Enterprise

Auditing allows the administrator to monitor activities on a Scylla cluster, including queries and data changes. The information is stored in a Syslog or a Scylla table.

Prerequisite¶

Enable ScyllaDB Authentication and Authorization.

Enabling Audit¶

Enabling auditing is controlled by the audit: parameter in the scylla.yaml file. You can set the following options:

none - Audit is disabled.
table - Audit is enabled, and messages are stored in a Scylla table (default).
syslog - Audit is enabled, and messages are sent to Syslog.

Configuring any other value results in an error at Scylla startup.

Configuring Audit¶

The audit can be tuned using the following flags or scylla.yaml entries:

Flag	Default Value	Description
audit_categories	“DCL,DDL,AUTH,ADMIN”	Comma-separated list of statement categories that should be audited
audit_tables	“”	Comma-separated list of table names that should be audited, in the format of <keyspacename>.<tablename>
audit_keyspaces	“”	Comma-separated list of keyspaces that should be audited. You must specify at least one keyspace. If you leave this option empty, no keyspace will be audited.

To audit all the tables in a keyspace, set the audit_keyspaces with the keyspace you want to audit and leave audit_tables empty.

You can use DCL, AUTH, and ADMIN audit categories without including any keyspace or table.

audit_categories parameter description¶

Parameter	Logs Description
AUTH	Logs login events
DML	Logs insert, update, delete, and other data manipulation language (DML) events
DDL	Logs object and role create, alter, drop, and other data definition language (DDL) events
DCL	Logs grant, revoke, create role, drop role, and list roles events
QUERY	Logs all queries
ADMIN	Logs service level operations: create, alter, drop, attach, detach, list. For service level auditing, this parameter is available in Scylla Enterprise 2019.1 and later.

Note that audit for every DML or QUERY might impact performance and consume a lot of storage.

Configuring Audit Storage¶

Auditing messages can be sent to Syslog or stored in a Scylla table. Currently, auditing messages can only be saved to one location at a time. You cannot log into both a table and the Syslog.

Storing Audit Messages in Syslog¶

Procedure

Set the audit parameter in the scylla.yaml file to syslog.

For example:

# audit setting
# by default, Scylla does not audit anything.
# It is possible to enable auditing to the following places:
#   - audit.audit_log column family by setting the flag to "table"
audit: "syslog"
#
# List of statement categories that should be audited.
audit_categories: "DCL,DDL,AUTH"
#
# List of tables that should be audited.
audit_tables: "mykespace.mytable"
#
# List of keyspaces that should be fully audited.
# All tables in those keyspaces will be audited
audit_keyspaces: "mykespace"

Restart the Scylla node.

sudo systemctl restart scylla-server

docker exec -it some-scylla supervisorctl restart scylla

(without restarting some-scylla container)

By default, audit messages are written to the same destination as Scylla logging, with scylla-audit as the process name.

Logging output example (drop table):

Mar 18 09:53:52 ip-10-143-2-108 scylla-audit[28387]: "10.143.2.108", "DDL", "ONE", "team_roster", "nba", "DROP TABLE nba.team_roster ;", "127.0.0.1", "anonymous", "false"

To redirect the Syslog output to a file, follow the steps below (available only for CentOS) :

Install rsyslog sudo dnf install rsyslog.
Edit /etc/rsyslog.conf and append the following to the file: if $programname contains 'scylla-audit' then /var/log/scylla-audit.log.
Start rsyslog systemctl start rsyslog.
Enable rsyslog systemctl enable rsyslog.

Storing Audit Messages in a Table¶

Messages are stored in a Scylla table named audit.audit_log.

For example:

CREATE TABLE IF NOT EXISTS audit.audit_log (
      date timestamp,
      node inet,
      event_time timeuuid,
      category text,
      consistency text,
      table_name text,
      keyspace_name text,
      operation text,
      source inet,
      username text,
      error boolean,
      PRIMARY KEY ((date, node), event_time));

Procedure

Set the audit parameter in the scylla.yaml file to table.

For example:

# audit setting
# by default, Scylla does not audit anything.
# It is possible to enable auditing to the following places:
#   - audit.audit_log column family by setting the flag to "table"
audit: "table"
#
# List of statement categories that should be audited.
audit_categories: "DCL,DDL,AUTH"
#
# List of tables that should be audited.
audit_tables: "mykespace.mytable"
#
# List of keyspaces that should be fully audited.
# All tables in those keyspaces will be audited
audit_keyspaces: "mykespace"

Restart Scylla node.

sudo systemctl restart scylla-server

docker exec -it some-scylla supervisorctl restart scylla

(without restarting some-scylla container)

Table output example (drop table):

SELECT * FROM audit.audit_log ;

returns:

 date                    | node         | event_time                           | category | consistency | error | keyspace_name | operation                    | source          | table_name  | username |
-------------------------+--------------+--------------------------------------+----------+-------------+-------+---------------+------------------------------+-----------------+-------------+----------+
2018-03-18 00:00:00+0000 | 10.143.2.108 | 3429b1a5-2a94-11e8-8f4e-000000000001 |      DDL |         ONE | False |           nba | DROP TABLE nba.team_roster ; | 127.0.0.1       | team_roster | Scylla   |
(1 row)

Additional Resources¶

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