Kubernetes Auditing and Events: Monitoring Cluster Activity

Published: Friday, December 19, 2025 at 9:00 pm

Kubernetes Auditing: Monitoring Cluster Activity

Kubernetes, a popular container orchestration platform, offers robust logging and auditing capabilities to monitor cluster activity. This functionality is crucial for understanding application behavior, tracking cluster-wide events, and ensuring security.

Kubernetes views logging from multiple perspectives: container activity, cluster-level operations, and application behavior within containers. Container runtimes are responsible for handling standard output and standard error logs. Kubernetes promotes the use of logging agents, either as sidecars or DaemonSets, to capture events across the cluster. Kubernetes provides its own logging library, klog, and is moving towards adopting logr, which offers a stronger decoupling between the logging interface and log-content output.

Kubernetes auditing allows administrators to track actions within the cluster, including who initiated them and when. This is achieved by configuring audit policies on the API server and specifying where audit events should be sent, such as a webhook or a log file in JSON Lines format. The audit logs contain key fields like timestamp, auditID, user information, verb (action taken), affected resource, namespace, source IP, and the request URI.

To collect event data, Kubernetes exposes its activities and events via its API server. The Kubernetes events plugin, such as the kubernetes_events plugin, can be used to capture these events and integrate them into the log events pipeline. The plugin uses a SQLite database to prevent event duplication. The plugin uses attributes to define the number of seconds or nanoseconds (interval_sec or interval_nsec attribute).

Securing the Kubernetes token and certificates is crucial. It is recommended to store these files as Kubernetes secrets and then define a mount point that maps to the secrets within the pod specs. This approach ensures secure data storage and allows for credential rotation. Kubernetes event data should be treated as informative, supplemental data.

BNN's Perspective:

The ability to audit and monitor Kubernetes clusters is essential for maintaining security and operational efficiency. While the platform provides the tools, organizations must prioritize secure configuration and proper interpretation of the data. The use of secrets for credential management is a best practice, and treating audit events as supplemental data is a prudent approach.

Keywords: Kubernetes, auditing, logging, events, cluster activity, containers, API server, Fluent Bit, klog, logr, security, compliance, JSON Lines, webhook, secrets, pod specs, DaemonSet, sidecar, container runtime, SQLite, Kubernetes events plugin

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