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Auditing is a reporting functionality to notify other subsystems of the outcome of an authorization. It is used to check the activity of certain entities within a cluster. It is highly demanded in most businesses to have the ability of obtaining audit information in case someone changes cluster configuration (like creation/deletion/modify/description of any topic or ACLs) or even record client events in some environment. Audits need to be structured as the implementors of this auditing would be JVM based applications and a more loose format (such as as emitting JSON as KIP-673) would in fact provide a less safe API.

As a broader requirement reporting can happen to multiple services attached to Kafka each capturing different aspects and not just the outcome of the authorization but the outcome of the whole action. In a simple use-case one might log topic create events with the information whether they were authorized and successful or not. In a more complicated use-case one can report client and topic events into Apache Atlas which can create a dependency graph of these events to visualize the interconnectedness of clients and topics.

In this KIP we try to provide a generic solution that can be applied to a broader interpretation of auditing which can be applied to a variety of use-cases, such as the ones described above in a similar implementation fashion as the Authorizer.

Public Interfaces

Auditor

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