Logging Scenario - Regularly Export Activities

Scenario: You want to export admin activities from your organization on a regular basis. This document explains how to do this by leveraging the sdm audit functionality to retrieve a list of activities every five minutes and write them to a JSON file. A separate tool can then import these files into a log aggregator or SIEM.

Initial Setup #

We recommend creating a new Linux system user with restricted permissions to run the audit. In this example, we use sdm. Download and install StrongDM for Linux.

Create an Admin Token #

To create an admin token, sign into the StrongDM Admin UI and go to Principals > Tokens. From there you can create an admin token with the specific rights you require—in this case, only the Audit > Activities permission.

After you click Create, a dialog displays the admin token. Copy the token, and save it for later use in /etc/sdm-admin.token in the format SDM_ADMIN_TOKEN=<YOUR_TOKEN>.

This file must be owned by your user.

chown sdm:sdm /etc/sdm-admin.token

For more details on creating admin tokens, see Create Admin Tokens.

Example Activity Export Script #

Here is an example activity export script that in the next step we set up to run periodically. You may note that this script is really just one command: we set it up as a script for clarity but if you prefer you can insert just the sdm audit... command directly into crontab.

#!/bin/bash
export SDM_ADMIN_TOKEN=<insert admin token here>
START=$(date -d "5 minutes ago" '+%Y-%m-%dT%H:%M:00') # start of audit slice, defaulting to 5 minutes ago
FN=$(date -d "yesterday 00:00" '+%Y%m%d%H%M') # timestamp string to append to output filename
END=$(date '+%Y-%m-%dT%H:%M:00') # end of audit slice, defaulting to now, at the top of the minute
TARGET=/var/log/sdm # location where JSON files are written

/opt/strongdm/bin/sdm audit activities --from "$START" --to "$END" -j > "$TARGET/activities.$FN.json"

Add Crontab Entry #

Although most Linux systems have locations to place scripts that run daily, weekly, and so on, the script is configured by default to run every five minutes. As such, our best bet is to place it directly into the crontab file for a user or for the system.

Add this line to the crontab of your choice, modifying the interval to match what you set in the script:

*/5 * * * * /path/to/script.sh