Event Logs
Bitwarden event logs are used for Teams and Enterprise organizations to capture timestamped records of events that occur within the organization. For documentation on how to view events, see the Help Center.
Types of Events
The events that we log can be broken down into two different types, based on where the event is triggered.
| Trigger Location | Description |
|---|---|
| Server | User actions that manifest as server-side operations, generally anything related to organization management. |
| Client | User interactions on locally synced data that does not result in server-side operations. These are typically prefixed with a Client_ prefix. One example is Cipher_ClientAutofill which logs the autofill of organization items. |
Whenever possible we prefer to use server-side events since they incur less network traffic and cannot be circumvented by modifying the client.
Writing Events
Events are handled on our clients through the
EventCollectionService
and
EventUploadService
for our JavaScript clients and the
EventService
for our mobile clients. These services enqueue the events into a collection stored client-side which
is periodically uploaded to the server, currently at 60 seconds intervals. Logs are also uploaded on
logout, so there are no events orphaned in the collection.
Uploaded event logs are sent to the server through POST requests to the /collect endpoint on the
Events service, which is handled by the CollectController. The controller performs some basic
mapping before passing the events to the EventService.
Server-side events are sent directly to the EventService, bypassing the Events service completely.
The EventService implementation differs for the cloud and self-hosted instances. This is handled
by the IEventWriteService.
Cloud-Hosted
For cloud-hosted instances, we use the
AzureQueueEventWriteService
implementation, which writes the events to an Azure Queue that is specified in the
globalSettings.Events.ConnectionString configuration setting.
The events in the Azure Queue are then processed by the EventsProcessor service that runs in the
Bitwarden cloud-hosted instance. The EventsProcessor is running the
AzureQueueHostedService,
which dequeues the event logs from the Azure Queue and writes them to Azure Table storage using the
EventRepository.
Self-Hosted
On self-hosted instances, the
RepositoryEventWriteService
writes the event logs to the Events database table directly using the EventRepository.
Querying Events
Event logs are queried through the
EventsController
on the Bitwarden API.
As with writing events, the querying of events differs based on the hosting method used for your Bitwarden instance. Since the events are logged to different places (Azure Table storage vs. the Bitwarden SQL database), the querying of these events must be different as well.
We do this with Dependency Injection in the Api project. The
IEventRepository
will have different implementations based on the hosting environment and the database provider in
use.
Cloud-Hosted
For cloud-hosted Bitwarden instances, the EventsController will query the Azure Table storage to
look for the event logs, through the
Bit.Core.Repositories.TableStorage.EventRepository
class, which implements IEventRepository.
Self-Hosted
On self-hosted Bitwarden instances, the EventsController will use the IEventRepository to query
the Events database table for the event logs.