What is an activity log?
About Activity Logs An Activity Log (also known as an Activity Diary or a Job Activity Log) is a written record of how you spend your time. By keeping an Activity Log for a few days, you can build up an accurate picture of what you do during the day, and how you invest your time.
What is Azure Log Analytics used for?
Log Analytics is a tool in the Azure portal used to edit and run log queries with data in Azure Monitor Logs. You may write a simple query that returns a set of records and then use features of Log Analytics to sort, filter, and analyze them.
What are Azure diagnostic logs?
With Azure diagnostic logs, you can view core analytics and save them into one or more destinations including: Azure Storage account. Log Analytics workspace. Azure Event Hubs.
How do I read Azure logs?
View virtual machine traces in Azure portalOpen the Azure portal in a web browser.Filter the list of resource by the resource group, rg-demo-vm-eastus .Select the demoWebAppMonitor resource.Select the Monitoring section's Logs item. ... Select the Application Insights item named traces by double-clicking on it.More items...•
What is the difference between Azure Monitor and Log Analytics?
Azure Monitor builds on top of Log Analytics, the platform service that gathers log and metrics data from all your resources. The easiest way to think about it is that Azure Monitor is the marketing name, whereas Log Analytics is the technology that powers it.
Where are Azure logs stored?
All logs are stored in block blobs in a container named $logs , which is automatically created when Storage Analytics is enabled for a storage account. The $logs container is located in the blob namespace of the storage account, for example: http://
What is Azure resource logs?
Azure resource logs are platform logs that provide insight into operations that were performed within an Azure resource. The content of resource logs varies by the Azure service and resource type. Resource logs are not collected by default.
How do I turn on Activity Log in Azure?
Alert on Azure AD activity log dataFrom the workspace, select Set alert to open the Create rule page.Select the default alert criteria created in the alert and update the Threshold in the default metric to 10.Enter a name and description for the alert, and choose the severity level.More items...•
What is Azure monitoring?
Azure Monitor helps you maximize the availability and performance of your applications and services. It delivers a comprehensive solution for collecting, analyzing, and acting on telemetry from your cloud and on-premises environments.
How long are Azure logs kept?
Activity reportsReportAzure AD FreeAzure AD Premium P2Audit logsSeven days30 daysSign-insSeven days30 daysAzure AD MFA usage30 days30 daysFeb 8, 2022
What is Azure log profile?
Ensure there is a Log Profile created for each Microsoft Azure account subscription for exporting activity logs. The Azure activity log captures all management activities performed on a subscription. By default, the Azure Portal retains activity logs only for 90 days.
How do I set up an Azure log?
Create a workspace In the Azure portal, click All services. In the list of resources, type Log Analytics. As you begin typing, the list filters based on your input. Select Log Analytics workspaces.
What is the difference between application insights and log analytics?
"Log Analytics" is referred as a feature and not what used to be known as Log Analytics as a product. For instance, Application Insights resources provide the same "Log Analytics" feature. For Azure Functions / APIM the native integration with Azure Monitor is through Application Insights.
What language does log analytics use?
KustoWith Log Analytics, you can write queries using its custom query language called Kusto.
What kind of data does Azure Monitor collect?
Azure Monitor collects data from various sources including logs and metrics from Azure platform and resources, custom applications, and agents running on virtual machines.
What are Azure analysis services?
Azure Analysis Services is a fully managed platform as a service (PaaS) that provides enterprise-grade data models in the cloud. Use advanced mashup and modeling features to combine data from multiple data sources, define metrics, and secure your data in a single, trusted tabular semantic data model.
What is Azure Activity Log?
The Azure Activity log provides insight into any subscription-level events that have occurred in Azure. This article describes Activity log categories and the schema for each.
When did Activity Log change format?
The format of Activity log data written to a storage account changed to JSON Lines on Nov. 1st, 2018. See Prepare for format change to Azure Monitor resource logs archived to a storage account for details on this format change.
What is Azure resource health?
This category contains the record of any resource health events that have occurred to your Azure resources. An example of the type of event you would see in this category is "Virtual Machine health status changed to unavailable." Resource health events can represent one of four health statuses: Available, Unavailable, Degraded, and Unknown. Additionally, resource health events can be categorized as being Platform Initiated or User Initiated.
What is the administrative category in Azure?
If the operation type is Write, Delete, or Action, the records of both the start and success or fail of that operation are recorded in the Administrative category. The Administrative category also includes any changes to Azure role-based access control in a subscription.
What are the two alert event providers?
The properties field will contain different values depending on the source of the alert event. Two common alert event providers are Activity Log alerts and metric alerts.
What is Azure Activity Log?
The Azure Activity Log is primarily for activities that occur in Azure Resource Manager. It does not track resources using the Classic/RDFE model. Some Classic resource types have a proxy resource provider in Azure Resource Manager (for example, Microsoft.ClassicCompute). If you interact with a Classic resource type through Azure Resource Manager using these proxy resource providers, the operations appear in the Activity Log. If you interact with a Classic resource type outside of the Azure Resource Manager proxies, your actions are only recorded in the Operation Log. The Operation Log can be browsed in a separate section of the portal.
What is platform log?
Platform logs provide detailed diagnostic and auditing information for Azure resources and the Azure platform they depend on. They are automatically generated although you need to configure certain platform logs to be forwarded to one or more destinations to be retained. This article provides an overview of platform logs including what information they provide and how you can configure them for collection and analysis.
What is Azure Activity Log?
Entries from the Azure Activity log that provides insight into any subscription-level or management group level events that have occurred in Azure.
What is a blob in RBAC?
Blob of RBAC properties of the event. Usually includes the “action”, “role” and “scope” properties. Stored as dynamic column.
Why send Azure AD activity logs to Azure Monitor logs?
Send Azure AD activity logs to Azure Monitor logs to enable rich visualizations, monitoring and alerting on the connected data.
What is Azure Log Analytics?
An Azure Log Analytics workspace to send logs to Azure Monitor logs.
What is audit log?
Audit logs: The audit logs activity reportgives you access to information about changes applied to your tenant, such as users and group management, or updates applied to your tenant’s resources.
What is Azure AD tenant?
An Azure AD tenant. A user who's a global administrator or security administrator for the Azure AD tenant. Azure AD Premium 1, or Premium 2 license, to access the Azure AD sign-in logs in the Azure portal. Depending on where you want to route the audit log data, you need either of the following:
How much storage does an audit log use?
Every audit log event uses about 2 KB of data storage. Sign in event logs are about 4 KB of data storage. For a tenant with 100,000 users, which would incur about 1.5 million events per day, you would need about 3 GB of data storage per day. Because writes occur in approximately five-minute batches, you can anticipate approximately 9,000 write operations per month.
How many events per second in a tenant?
For example, about 18 events per second ordinarily occur for a large tenant of more than 100,000 users, a rate that equates to 5,400 events every five minutes. Because audit logs are about 2 KB per event, this equates to 10.8 MB of data. Therefore, 43 messages are sent to the Event Hub in that five-minute interval.
What is Azure Monitor supported by?
A: A: Currently, Azure Monitor is supported by Splunk, IBM QRadar, Sumo Logic, ArcSight, LogRhythm, and Logz.io. For more information about how the connectors work, see Stream Azure monitoring data to an event hub for consumption by an external tool.
What is Azure Activity Log?
The Azure Activity Log is actually a part of the Azure Monitor service/solution. But in short, it logs activities that occur at the Subscription level in Azure. Of important note, the Activity Log is different from Diagnostic Logs. Activity Logs provide data about the operations on a resource from the outside (the “control plane”).
Can Azure Activity Logs be integrated into OMS?
You may also have noticed that you can integrate your Azure Activity Logs into the Operations Management Suite (OMS); also known as Log Analytics. We will cover this specific tool in a later post, but in short, the Azure Activity OMS Solution will summarize what’s occurred in your subscription, making it a little easier to investigate.
How to archive activity log in Azure?
To archive the activity log in a storage account, click on Azure Monitor, and then Activity Log, and click on the Export button located at the top of the blade on the right side. In the new blade, define the regions that you want to collect the log activity and check the option Export to a storage account, and select the desired storage account ...
What is activity log?
The activity log is the final destination for auditing and security for your Microsoft Azure environment and improves operations and security practices. It shouldn’t be taken lightly, and proper planning where to store the information and what type of integration is required to use with your current solution (if you have any) must be considered as part of your Microsoft Azure adoption.
What is the result area in Azure?
The results will show useful information to pinpoint who, when, and what any given action was performed in Azure infrastructure . We can always add and remove columns by using the Columns button (located at the top). In the example below, we have a new VM being provisioned, and we can see the creation of PublicIPAddress, who performed the creation of the VM, what type of resource (network, compute, DevTest, and so forth), and the resource itself.
What is alert based on?
Keep in mind that the alert being generated is based on a specific entry. You may want to change it to be more generic, for example, to comprehend all storage accounts (alert target area), and also remove a specific user account (by default, the alert criteria will generate an alert when the same user from the entry executes the same task).
What does creation of a new resource do?
Creation of any new resource (storage, VM, load balancer, you name it) will trigger an entry on the management plane.
Where is the alert link in Activity Log?
In the same location, we have an option to create an alert. Click on the Add activity log alert link, which is located above Summary/JSON lines, and that will move to the Alert service with the Define Alert condition section already filled out with the information of the activity log entry that we were using.
Can you save a query in Activity Log?
Another nice feature when using the activity log is the ability to save queries. Let’s say that we created a query in the main blade that narrows down only the VM provision and updates. We can always click on the Save button and associate a name for that query. In the future, we just need to select the query from the drop-down and the query will be updated to match the saved query and the desired results will start being displayed in the results area.
Archive Activity Log
Archiving the Activity Log to a storage account is useful if you would like to retain your log data longer than 90 days (with full control over the retention policy) for audit, static analysis, or backup.
Stream Activity Logs
Azure Event Hubs is a data streaming platform and event ingestion service that can receive and process millions of events per second. Data sent to an event hub can be transformed and stored by using any real-time analytics provider or batching/storage adapters. Two ways you might use the streaming capability for the Activity Log are:
Destinations
Platform logs and metrics can be sent to the destinations in the following table. Follow each link in the following table for details on sending data to that destination.
Create diagnostic settings in Azure portal
You can configure diagnostic settings in the Azure portal either from the Azure Monitor menu or from the menu for the resource.
Enabling and Parsing Azure Activity Logs
To enable access to this data in Microsoft Sentinel the Azure Activity data connector should be enabled, instructions on how to enable the connector can be found here.
Analysing User Interactions
One way of using Azure activity data is to understand a user’s interaction with the service. Below is an example of using Azure Activity to understand what a user did during a time that suspicious account activity may have taken place.
Proactively Hunting for Suspicious Operations
Using Azure Activity logs to investigate what actions a potentially compromised account may have executed is useful when responding to a potential compromise, however this requires a signal to indicate an account compromise may have taken place.
Run Command Extension Deep Dive
Run Command is a default extension to Windows and Linux virtual machines hosted in Azure. The feature consists of two core components, an Azure fabric controller and an on-host guest agent which runs on the virtual machine. Users can interact with the Azure fabric controller through the Azure Portal, Azure CLI or Azure PowerShell.
Conclusion
This blog post has covered how to enable Azure Activity logging and how to begin analysing the logs for malicious activity. A query was provided to explore operations and resource anomalies in a generic way, providing the basis for threat hunts targeting unauthorised usage of operations.
