Diagnostic logs
Written by
Updated at March 7, 2025
Trail diagnostic logs contain records of changes to the status of the trail itself.
Diagnostic logs have nothing to do with events occurring to the resources the trail collects audit logs for.
The trail statuses are as follows:
Active
: Trail is running and collecting audit logs from the available resources.Error
: Possible issues with the trail's destination objects or the trail itself. See our recommendations on how to recover the trail.
A running trail may enter the Error
status as a result of the administrator’s mistakes, such as:
- Changing the configuration of the destination object that Audit Trails audit logs are uploaded to (deleting a bucket in Object Storage or a Cloud Logging log group).
- Modifying the permissions of the service account used by the configured trail, such as revoking the
audit-trails.viewer
,storage.uploader
, or other permissions.
If the trail is recovered within three days after the Error
status occurred, all audit records generated while the trail was down will be uploaded to the appropriate destination object.
If the trail is recovered more than three days after the Error
status occurred, audit events uploaded to the destination object will include events generated over the 72 hours preceeding its recovery.