OSF DCE Administration Guide--Core Components

Chapter 42. DCE Audit Service
Auditing plays a critical role in distributed systems. Adequate audit facilities are
necessary for detecting and recording critical events in distributed applications.
Auditing, a key component of DCE, is provided by the DCE Audit Service. This chapter
provides an introduction to the DCE Audit Service.
42.1 Features of the DCE Audit Service
The DCE Audit Service has the following features:
• An audit daemon (auditd) performs the logging of audit records based on specified
criteria.
• Application programming interfaces (APIs) can be used as part of application server
programs to record audit events. These APIs can also be used to create tools that can
analyze the audit records.
• An administrative command interface to the audit daemon directs the daemon in
selecting the events that are going to be recorded based on certain criteria. This
interface is accessed through the DCE control program (dcecp).
• An event classification mechanism allows the logical grouping of a set of events for
ease of administration.
• Audit records can be directed to logs or to the console.
42.2 Components of the DCE Audit Service
The DCE Audit Service has three basic components:
• Application programming interfaces (APIs)
Provide the functions that are used to detect and record critical events when the
application server services a client. The application programmer uses these functions
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