Configuring the audit log policy

You can control the amount of information that is logged to the API server audit logs by choosing the audit log policy profile to use.

About audit log policy profiles

Audit log profiles define how to log requests that come to the OpenShift API server, the Kubernetes API server, and the OAuth API server.

OKD provides the following predefined audit policy profiles:

ProfileDescription

Default

Logs only metadata for read and write requests; does not log request bodies except for OAuth access token creation (login) requests. This is the default policy.

WriteRequestBodies

In addition to logging metadata for all requests, logs request bodies for every write request to the API servers (create, update, patch). This profile has more resource overhead than the Default profile. [1]

AllRequestBodies

In addition to logging metadata for all requests, logs request bodies for every read and write request to the API servers (get, list, create, update, patch). This profile has the most resource overhead. [1]

  1. Sensitive resources, such as Secret, Route, and OAuthClient objects, are never logged past the metadata level. OAuth tokens are not logged at all if your cluster was upgraded from OKD 4.5, because their object names might contain secret information.

By default, OKD uses the Default audit log profile. You can use another audit policy profile that also logs request bodies, but be aware of the increased resource usage (CPU, memory, and I/O).

Configuring the audit log policy

You can configure the audit log policy to use when logging requests that come to the API servers.

Prerequisites

  • You have access to the cluster as a user with the cluster-admin role.

Procedure

  1. Edit the APIServer resource:

    1. $ oc edit apiserver cluster

  2. Update the spec.audit.profile field:

    1.   apiVersion: config.openshift.io/v1
    2.   kind: APIServer
    3.   metadata:
    4.   ...
    5.   spec:
    6.     audit:
    7.       profile: WriteRequestBodies (1)
    1Set to Default, WriteRequestBodies, or AllRequestBodies. The default profile is Default.

  3. Save the file to apply the changes.

  4. Verify that a new revision of the Kubernetes API server pods has rolled out. This will take several minutes.

    1. $ oc get kubeapiserver -o=jsonpath='{range .items[0].status.conditions[?(@.type=="NodeInstallerProgressing")]}{.reason}{"\n"}{.message}{"\n"}'

    Review the NodeInstallerProgressing status condition for the Kubernetes API server to verify that all nodes are at the latest revision. The output shows AllNodesAtLatestRevision upon successful update:

    1. AllNodesAtLatestRevision
    2. 3 nodes are at revision 12 (1)
    1In this example, the latest revision number is 12.

    If the output shows a message similar to one of the following, this means that the update is still in progress. Wait a few minutes and try again.

    • 3 nodes are at revision 11; 0 nodes have achieved new revision 12

    • 2 nodes are at revision 11; 1 nodes are at revision 12