Viewing Cloud audit logs

This page describes the audit logs created by Cloud IoT Core as part of Cloud Audit Logs.

Overview

Google Cloud services write audit logs to help you answer the questions, "Who did what, where, and when?" Your Cloud projects each contain only the audit logs for resources that are directly within the project. Other entities, including folders, organizations, and billing accounts, each contain the audit logs for the entity itself.

Cloud IoT Core writes, and provides by default, audit logs for Admin Activity, which include operations that modify the configuration or metadata of a resource. These include device settings, cloud-to-device configurations, and device registry settings.

Cloud IoT Core writes, and doesn't provide by default, audit logs for Data Access, which record API calls that read user-provided data.

Enabling audit logging

Admin Activity audit logs are enabled by default and can only be disabled through Cloud Logging exclusions.

Most Google Cloud Data Access audit logs are disabled by default. The exception is Data Access audit logs for BigQuery, which are enabled by default and cannot be disabled; BigQuery Data Access logs do not count against your project's logging quota.

To enable some or all of your Data Access logs, see Configuring Data Access Logs.

The Data Access logs that you configure can affect your logs pricing in Google Cloud's operations suite. For more information, see the Pricing section on this page.

Audited operations

The following table summarizes which API operations correspond to each audit log type in Cloud IoT Core:

Audit logs category	Cloud IoT Core operations
Admin Activity logs	`CreateDeviceRegistry` `DeleteDeviceRegistry` `UpdateDeviceRegistry` `CreateDevice` `DeleteDevice` `UpdateDevice` `ModifyCloudToDeviceConfig` `SetIamPolicy`
Data Access logs (`ADMIN_READ`)	`GetDeviceRegistry` `ListDeviceRegistries` `GetDevice` `ListDevices` `GetIamPolicy`
Data Access logs (`DATA_READ`)	None
Data Access logs (`DATA_WRITE`)	None

Data Access logs

There are three categories of Data Access audit logs: ADMIN_READ, DATA_READ, and DATA_WRITE. However, Cloud IoT Core only uses ADMIN_READ data access logs. This is because DATA_READ and DATA_WRITE logs are only used for services that store and manage user data (such as Cloud Storage, Cloud Spanner, and Cloud SQL), which doesn't apply to Cloud IoT Core.

Data Access log type	Description	Availability
`ADMIN_READ`	Operations that read the configuration or metadata of a resource.	Cloud IoT Core doesn't provide `ADMIN_READ` logs by default.
`DATA_READ`	Operations that read user-provided data from a resource.	Cloud IoT Core doesn't provide `DATA_READ` logs.
`DATA_WRITE`	Operations that write user-provided data to a resource.	Cloud IoT Core doesn't provide `DATA_WRITE` logs.

You can configure audit information that isn't provided by default. For details, see Configuring Data Access Logs.

Audit log format

Audit log entries, which can be viewed using the Logs Viewer, the API, or the SDK gcloud logging command, include the following objects:

The log entry itself, which is an object of type LogEntry. Useful fields include the following:
- logName contains the project identification and audit log type
- resource contains the target of the audited operation
- timestamp contains the time of the audited operation
- protoPayload contains the audited information
The audit information, which is an AuditLog object held in the protoPayload field of the log entry.

For other fields in these objects, samples of their contents, and sample queries on information in the objects, see Audit Log Datatypes.

Log name and service name

Cloud Audit Logs log names indicate the project or other entity that owns the audit logs, and whether the log contains Admin Activity or Data Access information. For example, the following shows log names for a project's Admin Activity logs and an organization's Data Access logs.

projects/PROJECT_ID/logs/cloudaudit.googleapis.com%2Factivity
organizations/ORGANIZATION_ID/logs/cloudaudit.googleapis.com%2Fdata_access

Service names and resource types

Cloud IoT Core audit logs use the service name cloudiot.googleapis.com.

Cloud IoT Core audit logs use the resource types cloudiot_device and cloudiot_device_registry for all audit logs.

For more details on logging services and resources, see Mapping services to resources.

Audit log permissions

Cloud Identity and Access Management permissions and roles determine which audit logs you can view or export. Logs reside in projects and in some other entities including organizations, folders, and billing accounts. For more information, see Understanding Roles.

To view Admin Activity logs, you must have one of the following Cloud IAM roles in the project that contains your audit logs:

Project Owner, Project Editor, or Project Viewer. For more information, see IAM Roles.
The Logging Logs Viewer role.
A custom Cloud IAM role with the logging.logEntries.list Cloud IAM permission.

To view Data Access logs, you must have one of the following roles in the project that contains your audit logs:

Project Owner.
The Logging Private Logs Viewer role.
A custom Cloud IAM role with the logging.privateLogEntries.list Cloud IAM permission.

If you are using audit logs from a non-project entity, such as an organization, then change the Project roles to suitable organization roles.

Viewing logs

To view audit logs for one of your projects, do one of the following:

View a summary of your Admin Activity logs in the Activity dashboard:

Go to Activity
View all your audit logs using the Logs Viewer.

Go to the Logs Viewer page

For more details, see the following options:

Basic Viewer

You can use the Logs Viewer basic interface to retrieve your audit log entries by doing the following:

In the first menu, select the resource type whose audit logs you wish to see. Select a specific resource or all of them.
In the second menu, select the log name you want to see: activity for Admin Activity audit logs and data_access for Data Access audit logs. If you don't see one or both of those options, then there are no audit logs of that type available.

Advanced Viewer

Switch to the advanced filter interface in the Logs Viewer.
Create a filter that specifies the resource type(s) and log names you want. For more information, see Retrieving audit logs.

API

To read your log entries through the Logging API, see entries.list.

SDK

To read your log entries using the Cloud SDK gcloud command-line tool, see Reading log entries.

Exporting audit logs

You can export audit logs in the same way you export other kinds of logs. For details about how to export your logs, see Exporting Logs. Here are some applications of exporting audit logs:

To keep audit logs for a longer period of time or to use more powerful search capabilities, you can export copies of your audit logs to Cloud Storage, BigQuery, or Pub/Sub. Using Pub/Sub, you can export to other applications, other repositories, and to third parties.
To manage your audit logs across an entire organization, you can create aggregated sinks that can export logs from any or all projects in the organization.
If your enabled Data Access logs are pushing your projects over their logs allotments, you can export and exclude the Data Access logs from Logging. For details, see Excluding Logs.

Pricing

Cloud Logging doesn't charge you for audit logs that are enabled by default, including all Admin Activity logs. These logs don't count towards your log ingestion quota.

Cloud Logging charges you for Data Access logs that you explicitly request.

For more information on logs pricing, including audit logs pricing, see Google Cloud's operations suite Pricing.

Exempt methods

The following Cloud IoT Core API methods aren't logged in audit logs:

registries.testIamPermissions
registries.devices.configVersions.list
registries.devices.states.list