Configure Auditing¶

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Enable and Configure Audit Output

New in version 2.6.

MongoDB Enterprise supports auditing of various operations. A complete auditing solution must involve all mongod server and mongos router processes.

The audit facility can write audit events to the console, the syslog (option is unavailable on Windows), a JSON file, or a BSON file. For details on the audited operations and the audit log messages, see System Event Audit Messages.

Enable and Configure Audit Output¶

Use the --auditDestination option to enable auditing and specify where to output the audit events.

Warning

For sharded clusters, if you enable auditing on mongos instances, you must enable auditing on all mongod instances in the cluster, i.e. shards and config servers.

Output to Syslog¶

To enable auditing and print audit events to the syslog (option is unavailable on Windows) in JSON format, specify syslog for the --auditDestination setting. For example:

mongod --dbpath data/db --auditDestination syslog

Warning

The syslog message limit can result in the truncation of the audit messages. The auditing system will neither detect the truncation nor error upon its occurrence.

You may also specify these options in the configuration file:

storage:
   dbPath: data/db
auditLog:
   destination: syslog

Output to Console¶

To enable auditing and print the audit events to standard output (i.e. stdout), specify console for the --auditDestination setting. For example:

mongod --dbpath data/db --auditDestination console

You may also specify these options in the configuration file:

storage:
   dbPath: data/db
auditLog:
   destination: console

Output to JSON File¶

To enable auditing and print audit events to a file in JSON format, specify file for the --auditDestination setting, JSON for the --auditFormat setting, and the output filename for the --auditPath. The --auditPath option accepts either full path name or relative path name. For example, the following enables auditing and records audit events to a file with the relative path name of data/db/auditLog.json:

mongod --dbpath data/db --auditDestination file --auditFormat JSON --auditPath data/db/auditLog.json

The audit file rotates at the same time as the server log file.

You may also specify these options in the configuration file:

storage:
   dbPath: data/db
auditLog:
   destination: file
   format: JSON
   path: data/db/auditLog.json

Note

Printing audit events to a file in JSON format degrades server performance more than printing to a file in BSON format.

Output to BSON File¶

To enable auditing and print audit events to a file in BSON binary format, specify file for the --auditDestination setting, BSON for the --auditFormat setting, and the output filename for the --auditPath. The --auditPath option accepts either full path name or relative path name. For example, the following enables auditing and records audit events to a BSON file with the relative path name of data/db/auditLog.bson:

mongod --dbpath data/db --auditDestination file --auditFormat BSON --auditPath data/db/auditLog.bson

The audit file rotates at the same time as the server log file.

You may also specify these options in the configuration file:

storage:
   dbPath: data/db
auditLog:
   destination: file
   format: BSON
   path: data/db/auditLog.bson

To view the contents of the file, pass the file to the MongoDB utility bsondump. For example, the following converts the audit log into a human-readable form and output to the terminal:

bsondump data/db/auditLog.bson