Azure Activity Logs

Overview:

The following section provides an overview of the Schema of the Azure Activity log.

Activity Log:

The Azure Activity Log is a critical tool for monitoring and gaining insights into subscription-level events that occur within your Azure environment. It tracks a wide variety of operations, ranging from administrative actions to service health incidents, and it provides detailed logs that can be used for auditing, troubleshooting, and security monitoring.

Key Components of the Azure Activity Log Schema

  1. Severity Levels:

    • Critical: Events requiring immediate attention, such as application or system failures.

    • Error: Events indicating a problem that does not need immediate action but still needs addressing.

    • Warning: Events that serve as a forewarning of potential issues, indicating a resource may degrade into a more severe state.

    • Informational: Non-critical events that provide useful information, such as successful operations.

  2. Categories of Events:

    • Administrative: Logs all create, update, delete, and action operations performed through Azure Resource Manager. For example, creating a virtual machine or modifying a network security group.

    • Service Health: Logs incidents affecting Azure services, such as outages or maintenance events, that impact resources in your subscription.

    • Resource Health: Logs the health status of Azure resources, such as a virtual machine transitioning to an unavailable state.

    • Alert: Logs the activation of Azure alerts, such as when CPU usage exceeds a certain threshold.

    • Autoscale: Logs events related to the automatic scaling of resources based on defined autoscale rules.

    • Recommendation: Logs recommendations from Azure Advisor on improving security, performance, or cost-efficiency.

    • Security: Logs alerts generated by Microsoft Defender for Cloud, such as the execution of a suspicious file.

    • Policy: Logs actions performed by Azure Policy, such as audits or denies based on policy rules.

Schema Properties

Each event in the Activity Log has a comprehensive set of properties, including:

  • Authorization: Information on the permissions and roles involved in the operation.

  • CorrelationId: A unique identifier linking related events.

  • EventDataId: The unique identifier for the event itself.

  • ResourceId: The specific resource impacted by the event.

Category event types are broken down further in subsequent pages.

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