Audit Logs

Audit Logs are a collection of events that contain information relevant to notable actions taken by users in your application. Every event in the collection contains details regarding what kind of action was taken (action), who performed the action (actor), what resources were affected by the action (targets), and additional details of when and where the action took place.

{
  "action": "user.signed_in",
  "occurred_at": "2022-08-29T19:47:52.336Z",
  "actor": {
    "type": "user",
    "id": "user_01GBNJC3MX9ZZJW1FSTF4C5938"
  },
  "targets": [
    {
      "type": "team",
      "id": "team_01GBNJD4MKHVKJGEWK42JNMBGS"
    }
  ],
  "context": {
    "location": "123.123.123.123",
    "user_agent": "Chrome/104.0.0.0"
  }
}

These events are similar to application logs and analytic events, but are fundamentally different in their intent. They aren’t typically used for active monitoring/alerting, rather they exist as a paper trail of potentially sensitive actions taken by members of an organization for compliance and security reasons.

This guide will show you how to:

To get the most out of this guide, you’ll need:

Audit Log Event

An individual event that represents an action taken by an actor within your app.

Audit Log Export

A collection of Audit Log Events that are exported from WorkOS as a CSV file.

Organization

Describes a customer where Audit Log Events originate from.

WorkOS offers native SDKs in several popular programming languages. Choose a language below to see instructions in your application’s language.

To make calls to WorkOS, provide the API key and, in some cases, the client ID. Store these values as managed secrets, such as WORKOS_API_KEY and WORKOS_CLIENT_ID, and pass them to the SDKs either as environment variables or directly in your app’s configuration based on your preferences.

WORKOS_API_KEY='sk_example_123456789'
WORKOS_CLIENT_ID='client_123456789'

Before you can emit any Audit Log Events you must configure the allowed event schemas. To start, click “Create an event” and enter user.signed_in for action, team for targets, and click “Save event”.

All events are scoped to an Organization, so you will need the ID of an Organization in order to emit events.

Using the ID from the Organization, emit an Audit Log Event with the action and targets previously configured.

import { WorkOS } from '@workos-inc/node';

const workos = new WorkOS('sk_example_123456789');

await workos.auditLogs.createEvent('org_01EHWNCE74X7JSDV0X3SZ3KJNY', {
  action: 'user.signed_in',
  occurredAt: new Date(),
  actor: {
    type: 'user',
    id: 'user_01GBNJC3MX9ZZJW1FSTF4C5938',
  },
  targets: [
    {
      type: 'team',
      id: 'team_01GBNJD4MKHVKJGEWK42JNMBGS',
    },
  ],
  context: {
    location: '123.123.123.123',
    userAgent: 'Chrome/104.0.0.0',
  },
});

Once you have successfully emitted events with the WorkOS SDK, you can view them in the Dashboard under the Organization that the events are associated with.