"Missing" Microsoft Event Log events
"Tina Bird" <[email protected]> Tue, 30 Oct 2007 11:05:32 -0700
| Newsgroups | gmane.comp.sysutils.loganalysis |
|---|---|
| Message-ID | <006001c81b1f$76c50a60$1701a8c0@lindesfarne> |
Hi all -- In my latest bout of centralizing information about events relevant to administration and compliance management, I am reviewing my documentation on Microsoft audit policies and the events they control. This work uses this document http://www.splunkbase.com/howtos/Operating_Systems/Windows/howto:HOWTOunders tandMSEventLog or http://tinyurl.com/39uny7 as its starting point; for the HOWTO doc I went through each of the Microsoft documents describing areas of local security policy related to auditing, and summarized the specific event IDs associated with a given option in the audit configuration. As I work my way through this list, trying to identify things like what kinds of information are recorded in each event, I'm discovering numerous messages that are included in the audit policy documentation, but don't seem to be included in the Event Log any more. For instance, according to http://technet2.microsoft.com/windowsserver/en/library/50fdb7bc-7dae-4dcd-85 91-382aeff2ea791033.mspx?mfr=true or http://tinyurl.com/36nxgp, the MS doc entitled "Audit object access," there's a host of events with IDs in the 770s related to certificate authority activity and cert management. Of the 3 I've checked so far, none of those messages can be found in the Errors and Events Message Center: http://www.microsoft.com/technet/support/ee/ee_advanced.asp I vaguely recall that MS CA activity is now all recorded in a text log somewhere; in fact, http://technet2.microsoft.com/WindowsServer/en/library/b70185ed-93aa-4346-b8 69-9913282086af1033.mspx?mfr=true or http://tinyurl.com/2n48zp, written at around the same time the "Audit object access" page was last reviewed, states that CA transaction logs are stored in a file (in an unspecified location, sigh). So are the audit policy documents just seriously out of date? Or am I missing something? If these particular events can no longer be generated because activity is now recorded outside the Event Log, why haven't the audit policy documents been updated? And for event IDs that are still active, wouldn't it be great if the audit policy doc linked those messages to their complete descriptions from the Errors and Events database? yours perplexedly -- tbird