Understanding and using Access Transparency logs

This page describes the contents of Access Transparency log entries and how to view and use them.

Access Transparency logs in detail

Access Transparency logs can be integrated with your existing security information and event management (SIEM) tools to automate your audits of Google personnel when they access your content. Access Transparency logs are available in the Google Cloud console alongside your Cloud Audit Logs.

Access Transparency log entries include the following types of details:

• The affected resource and action.
• The time of the action.
• The reasons for the action (for example, the case number associated with a customer support request).
• Data about who is acting on the content (for example, the Google personnel's location).

Enabling Access Transparency

For information about enabling Access Transparency for your Google Cloud organization, see Enabling Access Transparency.

Viewing Access Transparency logs

After you've configured Access Transparency for your Google Cloud organization, you can set controls for who can access the Access Transparency logs by assigning a user or group the Private Logs Viewer role. See the Cloud Logging access control guide for details.

To view Access Transparency logs, use the following Google Cloud Observability logging filter.

logName="projects/PROJECT_ID/logs/cloudaudit.googleapis.com%2Faccess_transparency"

To learn how to see your Access Transparency logs in the Logs Explorer, see Using the Logs Explorer.

You can also monitor the logs by using the Cloud Monitoring API or using Cloud Run functions. To get started, see the Cloud Monitoring documentation.

Optional: Create a logs-based metric and then set up an alerting policy to give you timely awareness of issues surfaced by these logs.

Sample Access Transparency log entry

The following is an example of an Access Transparency log entry:

{
 insertId:  "abcdefg12345"
 jsonPayload: {
  @type:  "type.googleapis.com/google.cloud.audit.TransparencyLog"
  location: {
   principalOfficeCountry:  "US"
   principalEmployingEntity:  "Google LLC"
   principalPhysicalLocationCountry:  "CA"
  }
  principalJobTitle: "Engineering"
  product: [
   0:  "Cloud Storage"
  ]
  reason: [
    detail:  "Case number: bar123"
    type:  "CUSTOMER_INITIATED_SUPPORT"
  ]
  eventId: "asdfg12345asdfg12345asdfg12345"
  accesses: [
   0: {
    methodName: "GoogleInternal.Read"
    resourceName: "//googleapis.com/storage/buckets/BUCKET_NAME/objects/foo123"
    }
  ]
  accessApprovals: [
   0: "projects/123/approvalRequests/abcdef12345"
  ]
 }
 logName:  "projects/PROJECT_ID/logs/cloudaudit.googleapis.com%2Faccess_transparency"
 operation: {
  id:  "12345xyz"
 }
 receiveTimestamp:  "2017-12-18T16:06:37.400577736Z"
 resource: {
  labels: {
   project_id:  "1234567890"
  }
  type:  "project"
 }
 severity:  "NOTICE"
 timestamp:  "2017-12-18T16:06:24.660001Z"
}

Log field descriptions

Values for accesses:methodNames field

The following methods can appear in the accesses:methodNames field in Access Transparency logs:

• Standard methods: These methods are List, Get, Create, Update, and Delete. For more information, see Standard methods.
• Custom methods: Custom methods refer to API methods besides the 5 standard methods. Common custom methods include Cancel, BatchGet, Move, Search, and Undelete. For more information, see Custom methods.
• GoogleInternal methods: The following are examples of GoogleInternal methods that appear in the accesses:methodNames field:

The GoogleInternal accesses are strictly restricted to authorized personnel for justified and auditable access. The presence of a method doesn't indicate availability to all roles. Organizations seeking enhanced controls over administrative access on a project or organization can activate Access Approval to enable approval or denial of accesses based on access details. For example, Access Approval users can choose to permit only requests with the CUSTOMER_INITIATED_SUPPORT justification for requests made by a Google employee. For more information, see Overview of Access Approval.

If an event meets strict emergency access criteria, Access Approval can log that emergency access with the auto approved status. Access Transparency and Access Approval are specifically designed to include uninterrupted logging for emergency access scenarios.

If you are looking for more data security control over your workloads, we recommend using Assured Workloads. Assured Workloads projects offer enhanced functionalities such as, data residency, sovereign controls, and access to features such as confidential computing in Compute Engine. It leverages Key Access Justifications for externally-managed encryption keys.

Justification reason codes

Monitoring Access Transparency logs

You can monitor Access Transparency logs by using the Cloud Monitoring API. To get started, see the Cloud Monitoring documentation.

You can set up a logs-based metric and then set up an alerting policy to give you timely awareness of issues surfaced by these logs. For example, you can create a logs-based metric that captures Google personnel accesses of your content and then create an alerting policy in Monitoring that lets you know if the number of accesses in a given period exceeds a specified threshold.

What's next

• Learn how to view and understand Access Transparency logs for Google Workspace services.