Configure Auditing
On this page
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
Include additional options as required for your configuration. For instance, if you wish remote clients to connect to your deployment or your deployment members are run on different hosts, specify the --bind_ip. For more information, see Localhost Binding Compatibility Changes.
Important
Before you bind to other ip addresses, consider enabling access control and other security measures listed in Security Checklist to prevent unauthorized access.
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
Include additional options as required for your configuration. For instance, if you wish remote clients to connect to your deployment or your deployment members are run on different hosts, specify the --bind_ip. For more information, see Localhost Binding Compatibility Changes.
Important
Before you bind to other ip addresses, consider enabling access control and other security measures listed in Security Checklist to prevent unauthorized access.
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 the following options:
| Option | Value |
|---|---|
--auditDestination |
file |
--auditFormat |
JSON |
--auditPath |
The output filename. Accepts either the 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
Include additional options as required for your configuration. For instance, if you wish remote clients to connect to your deployment or your deployment members are run on different hosts, specify the --bind_ip. For more information, see Localhost Binding Compatibility Changes.
Important
Before you bind to other ip addresses, consider enabling access control and other security measures listed in Security Checklist to prevent unauthorized access.
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 the following options:
| Option | Value |
|---|---|
--auditDestination |
file |
--auditFormat |
BSON |
--auditPath |
The output filename. Accepts either the 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
Include additional options as required for your configuration. For instance, if you wish remote clients to connect to your deployment or your deployment members are run on different hosts, specify the --bind_ip. For more information, see Localhost Binding Compatibility Changes.
Important
Before you bind to other ip addresses, consider enabling access control and other security measures listed in Security Checklist to prevent unauthorized access.
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