Hello and welcome to the SAP HANA Academy.
The topic of this video tutorial series is SAP HANA as a Service and in this video we
will take a look at the Auditing activity, a security topic.
This video has been recorded in December 2018.
For earlier or later releases, please check the playlist on the SAP HANA Academy.
Hi, I am Denys van Kempen.
With auditing you can track who did what (or tried to do what) and when, in the database.
It is a security feature, although auditing itself, of course, does not provide any security.
There is an app for auditing in the SAP HANA cockpit with a tile on the Overview page,
the home page.
On the tile we can see whether auditing has been enabled.
Status = On
This is default setting for SAP HANA Service.
Note that you could decide to switch off auditing here.
That would be fine for development or test environments, of course.
For production systems, this would be atypical.
Let’s take a look up close.
We are now looking at the auditing app.
We see our audit policies listed.
Number one audits all unsuccessful logins.
Select the policy for details.
Action is connect and validate user.
Does not concern any object or any user in particular and we do not have any entries
yet, I just started this system up.
Let’s return.
Number two audits all successful logins and does this at the info level, not warning.
Typically, you will get a lot of info messages and these will mostly be ignored because you
are far more likely to filter warnings.
Then we audit configuration changes, so changes to the system parameters, to the INI files.
License delete, also important.
License install is also audited.
Both on info level.
And the change to the authentication provider, to certificates and encryption key, these
are also audited by default.
They all concern the system database, not our H00 tenant, and the system database is
managed by SAP, we cannot connect to it.
So, we are informed of any database activities at this level.
Now, if you consider any of these policies not relevant, you can easily delete the policy,
of course.
Similarly, you can create your own audit policies.
Works in a step-by-step, wizard-like approach.
Step 1, name the audit policy.
Let’s do ‘create table’
Step 2, select the action status: successful or unsuccessful actions and then select the
action it self: application auditing, backup and recovery, certificates, encryption, the
list is quite long.
Create table, here it is.
Then, step 3, whether you want to target any user in particular, or just all users.
Step 4 sets the audit level, info is fine in this case, and in step 5 you enable the
policy.
You can do this later on as well.
Review.
Save
OK.
So now we have our own audit policy, created on our tenant H00.
Let’s return to system overview and open the SQL Prompt, SAP HANA Database Explorer
for SAP HANA Cockpit.
OK, let’s paste in a bit of SQL and execute.
OK, let’s go back to the cockpit and open auditing, open our create table policy, and
take a look a the policy audit trail.
There we have our entry, timestamp, status, username, and we also get the statement.
Very good.
Show SQL Statement in the header refers to the audit policy, by the way.
HANA is a database, in the end, it is all SQL.
If we go back, and then select Configuration, here we can see the system settings.
Normally, you would be able to edit them all but here this has been disabled and we can
only enable or disable auditing, does the same as when clicking disable auditing on
the auditing tile on the overview page.
Makes no difference.
OK- cancel
And then we also have an audit trail here.
No items found, why is that?
Select configure, the gear icon.
Note that we have 35 column we could display, lots and lots of information.
If we go to filter, we can see that only the first policy is included.
So, if we add our policy, create table, and select OK.
The audit entry is now displayed.
So, instead of checking each policy you get a holistic view, of all audit entries, not
only of the database but also of the application server, XSA, XS Advanced, which you can then
filter on the level: only warnings, only emergencies, which you can sort, and so on.
OK —That’s it.
Auditing for the SAP Cloud Platform, SAP HANA Service for Cloud Foundry.
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