About audit logs
Note
Webhooks might be a good alternative to the audit log or API polling for certain use cases. Webhooks are a way for GitHub to notify your server when specific events occur for a repository, organization, or enterprise. Compared to the API or searching the audit log, webhooks can be more efficient if you just want to learn and possibly log when certain events occur on your enterprise, organization, or repository. See "Webhooks documentation."
The audit log lists events triggered by activities that affect your enterprise. Audit logs for GitHub Enterprise Server are retained indefinitely, unless an enterprise owner configured a different retention period. See "Configuring the audit log for your enterprise."
By default, only events from the past three months are displayed. To view older events, you must specify a date range with the created parameter. See "Understanding the search syntax."
The name for each audit log entry is composed of a category of events, followed by an operation type. For example, the repo.create entry refers to the create operation on the repo category.
Each audit log entry shows applicable information about an event, such as:
- The enterprise or organization an action was performed in
- The user (actor) who performed the action
- The user affected by the action
- Which repository an action was performed in
- The action that was performed
- Which country the action took place in
- The date and time the action occurred
- For actions outside of the web UI, how the user (actor) authenticated
Site administrators can review the audit log for an instance, which contains a wider range of events including system administrative events. To access the instance-level audit log:
- From an administrative account on GitHub Enterprise Server, in the upper-right corner of any page, click .
- If you're not already on the "Site admin" page, in the upper-left corner, click Site admin.
- In the left menu, click Audit log.
In addition to viewing your audit log, you can monitor activity in your enterprise in other ways, such as viewing push logs and managing global webhooks. For more information, see Exploring user activity in your enterprise. You can also use the audit log, and other tools, to monitor the actions taken in response to security alerts. For more information, see Auditing security alerts.
Using your audit logs
As an enterprise owner or site administrator, you can interact with the audit log data for your enterprise in several ways:
- You can view the audit log for your enterprise. For more information, see Accessing the audit log for your enterprise.
- You can search the audit log for specific events. For more information, see Searching the audit log for your enterprise.
- You can identify all events that were performed by a specific access token. For more information, see Identifying audit log events performed by an access token.
- You can configure settings, such as the retention period for audit log events and whether Git events are included. For more information, see Configuring the audit log for your enterprise.
- You can stream audit and Git events data from GitHub to an external data management system. For more information, see Streaming the audit log for your enterprise.
- You can forward audit and system logs, from your enterprise to an third-party hosted monitoring system. For more information, see Log forwarding.
- You can use the Audit log API to view actions performed in your enterprise. For more information, see Using the audit log API for your enterprise.
For a full list of audit log actions that may appear in your enterprise audit log, see Audit log events for your enterprise.