Using pgAudit to log database activity

Financial institutions, government agencies, and many industries need to keep audit logs to meet regulatory requirements. By using the PostgreSQL Audit extension (pgAudit) with your RDS for PostgreSQL DB instance, you can capture the detailed records that are typically needed by auditors or to meet regulatory requirements. For example, you can set up the pgAudit extension to track changes made to specific databases and tables, to record the user who made the change, and many other details.

The pgAudit extension builds on the functionality of the native PostgreSQL logging infrastructure by extending the log messages with more detail. In other words, you use the same approach to view your audit log as you do to view any log messages. For more information about PostgreSQL logging, see RDS for PostgreSQL database log files.

The pgAudit extension redacts sensitive data such as cleartext passwords from the logs. If your RDS for PostgreSQL DB instance is configured to log data manipulation language (DML) statements as detailed in Turning on query logging for your RDS for PostgreSQL DB instance, you can avoid the cleartext password issue by using the PostgreSQL Audit extension.

You can configure auditing on your database instances with a great degree of specificity. You can audit all databases and all users. Or, you can choose to audit only certain databases, users, and other objects. You can also explicitly exclude certain users and databases from being audited. For more information, see Excluding users or databases from audit logging.

Given the amount of detail that can be captured, we recommend that if you do use pgAudit, you monitor your storage consumption.

The pgAudit extension is supported on all available RDS for PostgreSQL versions. For a list of pgAudit versions supported by available RDS for PostgreSQL versions, see Extension versions for Amazon RDS for PostgreSQL in the Amazon RDS for PostgreSQL Release Notes.

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