Audit logs track and store authorization activities in Pulsar clusters, tenants, namespaces, and topics. After a Pulsar cluster is up and running within a large team, it’s critical to keep an eye on who is touching data and what they’re doing with it. Structured audit logs provide an easy way to track user/application access, so you can identify potential anomalies and bad actors. Structured audit logs enable you to capture audit logs in a set of dedicated Pulsar topics, either on a local or a remote cluster, including:
  • low-volume, management-related activities, such as creating or deleting tenants, namespaces or topics
  • high-volume activities, such as produce, consume, and acknowledge events
Because the audit logs are stored in a Pulsar topic, you should configure the cleanup and backlog policy for the namespace to avoid having the Pulsar retention policies inadvertently clean up the audit logs. For more information, see Configure policies for a namespace.

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Configure audit log

If you did not enable audit log when you set up your cluster, or if you want to change the settings, follow these steps.
  1. Log in to StreamNative Cloud Console.
  2. On the left navigation pane, in the Admin area, click Pulsar Clusters.
  3. Click Edit Cluster.
  4. If it is not already selected, click Advanced.
  5. Toggle the Audit Log option on.
  6. Select the types of audit logs you want to enable. For details about the types of events that you can enable, see event type.
  7. Click Finish to apply your changes and return to the Clusters page.

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Check the audit log status

To verify that audit log is running, on the left navigation pane of StreamNative Cloud Console, in the Admin area, click Pulsar Clusters. You can verify that the audit log is running, as shown in the following figure. screenshot of running audit log successfully

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Event type

Each audit log includes information about the event, event time, and permission status. The supported audit event types include:
CategoryTypeEvent typeDescriptionDefault value
ManagementClusterCreateClusterCreate a Pulsar cluster.true
ClusterUpdateClusterUpdate Pulsar cluster information.true
ClusterDeleteClusterDelete Pulsar cluster information.true
TenantCreateTenantCreate a Pulsar tenant.true
TenantUpdateTenantUpdate tenant information.true
TenantDeleteTenantDelete a Pulsar tenant.true
NamespaceCreateNamespaceCreate a namespace.true
NamespaceDeleteNamespaceDelete a namespace.true
TopicCreatePartitionedTopicCreate a partitioned topic.true
TopicUpdatePartitionsUpdate partitions for a partitioned topic.true
TopicDeletePartitionedTopicDelete a partitioned topic.true
SubscriptionCreateSubscriptionCreate a subscription.true
SubscriptionDeleteSubscriptionDelete a subscription.true
DescribeClusterListClustersList Pulsar clusters.false
ClusterGetClusterGet cluster information.false
TenantListTenantsList Pulsar tenants.false
TenantGetTenantGet tenant information.false
NamespaceListNamespacesList Pulsar namespaces.false
NamespaceGetNamespaceGet namespace information.false
TopicListTopicsList Pulsar topics.false
TopicListPartitionedTopicsList partitioned Pulsar topics.false
TopicGetPartitionsGet partitions of a partitioned topic.false
SubscriptionListSubscriptionsList subscriptions of a topic.false
ProduceProducerNewProducerCreate a producer to produce messages to the topic.false
ProducerCloseProducerClose a producer.false
ConsumeConsumerNewConsumerCreate a consumer to subscribe to the topic.false
ConsumerCloseConsumerClose a consumer.false

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Work with audit log

You can use Pulsar clients, Pulsar CLI, Rest API, and sink connectors to process and analyze the audit events stored in the Pulsar topics.

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Consume the audit log topic with Pulsar clients

You can get data from the audit log topic with Pulsar clients. Refer to the Connect section to learn how to configure Pulsar clients for StreamNative Cloud cluster and consume data from the audit log topic.

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Consume the audit log topic with Pulsar CLI

The pulsar-client is also a helpful tool to get data from the audit log topic.

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Consume the audit log topic with Rest API

StreamNative Cloud supports Rest API, which provides a RESTful interface to a Pulsar cluster. For more information, see Rest API to learn how to leverage the Rest API to consume data from the audit log topic.

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Sink audit log topic with connectors

If you want to integrate audit log data with your other data systems like Google BigQuery, AWS SQS, and AWS Kinesis, use a sink connector. For more information, see Deploy connectors to learn how to leverage connectors to integrate and synchronize audit log data.