Audit Event Logs

There are many user initiated events in MAAS that an administrator or a user may want to audit. These include someone updating the settings or changing a user's permissions. This page details how to query these events and includes examples of how to perform a query and the type of data logs can provide.

List audit events for all users

To list events for all users, use the following syntax:

maas $PROFILE events query level=AUDIT

Note: Non-administrators will only see their own audit event logs listed.

The following is example output from the previous command, using admin as the MAAS profile:

Success.
Machine-readable output follows:
{
    "count": 1,
    "events": [
        {
            "username": "admin",
            "node": null,
            "hostname": "",
            "id": 2569,
            "level": "AUDIT",
            "created": "Thu, 01 Feb. 2018 22:28:18",
            "type": "Authorisation",
            "description": "User admin logged in."
        }
    ],
    "next_uri": "/MAAS/api/2.0/events/?op=query&level=AUDIT&after=2569",
    "prev_uri": "/MAAS/api/2.0/events/?op=query&level=AUDIT&before=2558"
}

The above output shows that there is currently only one audit event log for the user admin and this was created when they logged into the web UI.

List audit events for a specific user

To list the audit event logs for a specific user that you have permissions for, supply the owner=$USERNAME parameter to the query command:

maas $PROFILE events query level=AUDIT owner=$USERNAME

As there is only one audit event log in the database (as seen above), generate some more by performing these actions:

• create new non-administrator user johnnybegood with admin user
• logout of web UI as admin user and login with johnnybegood user
• change password of the johnnybegood user
• log back into the web UI (Django forces a re-login when currently logged in user changes their password).

Let's take a look and see what type of audit event logs we have now, filtering with owner=johnnybegood as shown in the following command:

maas admin events query level=AUDIT owner=johnnybegood

Success.
Machine-readable output follows:
{
    "count": 3,
    "events": [
        {
            "username": "johnnybegood",
            "node": null,
            "hostname": "",
            "id": 2877,
            "level": "AUDIT",
            "created": "Mon, 12 Feb. 2018 22:34:46",
            "type": "Authorisation",
            "description": "User 'johnnybegood' logged in."
        },
        {
            "username": "johnnybegood",
            "node": null,
            "hostname": "",
            "id": 2876,
            "level": "AUDIT",
            "created": "Mon, 12 Feb. 2018 22:34:35",
            "type": "Authorisation",
            "description": "Password changed for 'johnnybegood'."
        },
        {
            "username": "johnnybegood",
            "node": null,
            "hostname": "",
            "id": 2875,
            "level": "AUDIT",
            "created": "Mon, 12 Feb. 2018 22:33:56",
            "type": "Authorisation",
            "description": "User 'johnnybegood' logged in."
        }
    ],
    "next_uri": "/MAAS/api/2.0/events/?op=query&level=AUDIT&owner=johnnybegood&after=2877",
    "prev_uri": "/MAAS/api/2.0/events/?op=query&level=AUDIT&owner=johnnybegood&before=2875"
}

As we can see above, only audit event logs for the user johnnybegood are generated. These events show the following:

• user for the event
• whether the event is associated with a particular node
• node's hostname
• event id
• level of the event
• when the event was created
• event type
• event description

Types of audit event logs

Here is a list of the types of audit event logs that are currently supported by MAAS:

• Password changes
• Permission changes
• API (OAuth) tokens created/deleted
• Login and logouts
• SSH keys imported from GitHub or Launchpad
• SSL key changes
• User profile changes
• Commissioning script changes
• Test script changes