Enabling audit loggingedit

You can log security-related events such as authentication failures and refused connections to monitor your cluster for suspicious activity. Audit logging also provides forensic evidence in the event of an attack.

Audit logs are disabled by default. You must explicitly enable audit logging.

To enable enable audit logging:

  1. Set xpack.security.audit.enabled to true in elasticsearch.yml.
  2. Restart Elasticsearch.

When audit logging is enabled, security events are persisted to a dedicated <clustername>_audit.json file on the host’s file system (on each node).

You can configure additional options to control what events are logged and what information is included in the audit log. For more information, see Auditing settings.