31.0 Enabling Auditing

Access Manager includes a licensed version of NovellĀ® Audit to provide compliance assurance logging and to maintain audit log entries that can be subsequently included in reports. In addition to selectable events, device generated alerts are automatically sent to the audit server.

Audit logs record events that have occurred in the identity and access management system and are primarily intended for auditing and compliance purposes. The types of events that are logged include the following:

Audit logging does not track the operational processing of the Access Manager components; that is, the processing and interactions between the Access Manager components required to fulfill a user request. (For this type of logging, see Section 32.2, Configuring Identity Server Logging). Audit logs record the results of user and administrator requests and other system events. Although the primary purpose for audit logging is for auditing and compliance, the types of events logged can also be useful for detecting abnormal and error conditions and can be used as a first alert mechanism for system support. You can configure the audit log entries to generate alerts by leveraging the Novell Audit Notification feature. You can select to generate e-mail, syslog, and SNMP notifications.

Access Manager has been assigned the Novell Audit server-alert event code 0x002E0605. The Novell Audit Platform Agent is responsible for packaging and forwarding the audit log entries to the configured Novell Audit server. If the Novell Audit server is not available, the platform agent caches log entries until the server is operational and can accept audit log data.

For additional information about Novell Audit, see Novell Audit 2.0.2 at the Novell Documentation Web site.

This section describes the following Access Manager features of auditing:

For a listing of all Novell Audit events logged by Access Manager, see Section G.0, Access Manager Audit Events and Data.