Log an applications usage of Crowd

[Deleted user]

We have just created a new "Generic" application in Crowd and would like to monitor its interaction with the server/api.

Is it possible to log the activity of an individual application? If so any help would be appreciated.

Thanks

[Deleted user · Accepted solution]

Based on Caspar's comment, there appears to be no native way to achieve the goal.

For the purpose of testing, I have configured Access Logging in Tomcat for the crowd context in our test instance as follows:

1. Stop Crowd

2. Modify {crowd-install}\apache-tomcat\conf\Catalina\localhost\crowd.xml and add the following element before the </Context> element:

   <Valve
       className="org.apache.catalina.valves.AccessLogValve"
       directory="${catalina.base}/logs"
       prefix="access_log."
       fileDateFormat="yyyy-MM-dd"
       suffix=".log"
       pattern="%a %{Authorization}i %t "%m %U%q %H" %s %b %D "%{Referer}i" "%{User-Agent}i""
      />

3. Start Crowd

This generates an access log file (one per day) in {crowd-install}\apache-tomcat\logs which can be interrogated to evaluate the interactions of an application with Crowd.

NB:

• This has been seen to work with Atlassian Crowd 2.7.x and 2.8.x - though there are no guarantees/warranties for its impact - use at your own discretion.
• The access log will include all interactions with Crowd, including those from the Console itself and any configured applications, e.g. JIRA and Confluence, therefore the access log files can grow rather quickly :)

[Martin Cleaver]

Ian - does this log the IP address of the application and the originating web browser of the user? Thx, M.

[Deleted user]

@Martin Cleaver [Blended Perspectives] - yes the log file should contain the following information * %a - Remote IP address * %{Authorization}I - the value of the value of incoming header with name _Authorisation_ * %t - the timestamp for the request * %m - Request method (GET, POST, etc.) * %U - Requested URL path * %q - Query string (prepended with a '?' if it exists) * %H - Request protocol * %s - HTTP status code of the response * %b - Bytes sent, excluding HTTP headers, or '-' if zero * %D - Time taken to process the request, in millis * %{Referer}i - the value of the value of incoming header with name _Referer_ * %{User-Agent}i - the value of the value of incoming header with name _User-Agent_ The actual output is configurable - for more information see [http://tomcat.apache.org/tomcat-7.0-doc/config/valve.html#Access_Log_Valve]

[Caspar Krieger]

Crowd has a few logging settings which you can turn on from the settings section of the administration console, but no generalised "show me what an application is doing" feature.

Please vote on CWD-2086 and/or CWD-538 if you'd like to see this feature added.

[Deleted user]

Hi Caspar

Thanks for the pointers - I'll take and look and vote on the issues if they're appropriate!