Understanding your responsibilities when using IBM Cloud Activity Tracker

Learn about the management responsibilities and terms and conditions that you have when you use IBM Cloud Activity Tracker. For a high-level view of the service types in IBM Cloud and the breakdown of responsibilities between the customer and IBM for each type, see Shared responsibilities for IBM Cloud offerings.

As of 28 March 2024 the IBM Log Analysis and IBM Cloud Activity Tracker services are deprecated and will no longer be supported as of 30 March 2025. Customers will need to migrate to IBM Cloud Logs, which replaces these two services, prior to 30 March 2025.

Review the following sections for the specific responsibilities for you and for IBM when you use IBM Cloud Activity Tracker. For the overall terms of use, see IBM Cloud Terms and Notices.

Incident and operations management

Table 1. Responsibilities for incident and operations
Task	IBM Responsibilities	Your Responsibilities
`Incident and operations management`	Maintain service instances and infrastructure workloads.	Maintain incident and operations management of your data.
`Monitor incidents`	Provide notifications for planned maintenance, security bulletins, or unplanned outages.	Set preferences to receive emails about platform notifications. Monitor the IBM Cloud status page for general announcements.
`Maintain IBM Cloud high availability SLA for Activity Tracker`	Provide Activity Tracker functionality across availability zones in a Multi-Zone Region (MZR). Provide Activity Tracker functionality across hosts in a Single-Zone Region (SZR). Provide replication, fail-over features, and infrastructure maintenance and updates.	Keep your Activity Tracker configuration in a version control system so that you can reconfigure a region if needed. Comply with Operational responsibilities when using IBM Cloud Object Storage.
`Monitor events for Activity Tracker`	Participating Cloud services publish relevant event data to their subscribing clients. Clients have the ability to receive this data once their account is configured.	Configure your account in each region where Cloud service subscriptions publish events to receive the published events.
`Maintain IBM Cloud high availability SLA for Activity Tracker`	Provide Cloud Service across availability zones in a Multi-Zone Region (MZR). Provide Cloud Service across hosts in a Single-Zone Region (SZR). Provides replication, fail-over features, and infrastructure maintenance and updates.	Use the list of available regions to plan for and create new instances of the service.
`Archive events for Activity Tracker`	Provide the ability to archive to a client configured Cloud Object Storage (COS) location and archive data.	Configure Cloud Object Storage per your requirements. Enable archiving of the Activity Tracker instance.
`Monitor events for Activity Tracker`	Participating Cloud services publish relevant event data to their subscribing clients. IBM Cloud Activity Tracker provides clients with the ability to receive the events once the client configures their instance.	Create an IBM Cloud Activity Tracker instance in each region where Cloud service subscriptions publish events to receive the published events. Create an instance in Frankfurt to get global Activity Tracker events. Create views, dashboards, and screens to view and analyze the data.
`Configuring exclusion rules for Activity Tracker`		Verify that each exclusion rule that you add behaves as expected. Improper configured exclusion rules can result in storing data not intended for storage. For more information on how to use exclusion rules, see Excluding data by using exclusion rules, Configuring conditional streaming and Configuring usage quota exclusion rules.

Change management

Table 2. Responsibilities for change management
Task	IBM Responsibilities	Your Responsibilities
`Updates to Activity Tracker`	Provide major, minor, and patch version updates for IBM Cloud Activity Tracker interfaces. Document changes in the Release notes	`N/A`
`Track versions of custom views, dashboards, screens, parsing templates, and alerts for Activity Tracker`	`N/A`	Use your own change management process to control versions of metadata resources such as views, dashboards, screens, parsing templates, and alerts`. To learn how to export metadata, see Export the configuration of resources in an auditing instance.

Identity and access management

Table 3. Responsibilities for identity and access management
Task	IBM Responsibilities	Your Responsibilities
`Manage permissions for Activity Tracker`	Provide the ability to restrict access to resources. IBM is responsible for the security and compliance of IBM Cloud Activity Tracker.	Restrict access to resources by using Cloud IAM access policies by defining IAM policies to control which users within your account have access to the data. Learn more about controlling access through IAM.

Security and regulation compliance

Table 4. Responsibilities for security and regulation compliance
Task	IBM Responsibilities	Your Responsibilities
`Meet security and compliance objectives`	Maintain controls that are commensurate to various industry compliance standards such as SOC2, PCI, HIPAA and Privacy Shield. For more information, see Securing your data.	Set up and maintain security and regulation compliance for your apps and data. This includes: Defining the account management strategy Configuring the accounts settings for compliance Define IAM Strategy Define the notification strategy Ensure encryption of archived data by configuring a COS bucket that has full control over the data encryption keys that are used. IBM Cloud® Object Storage provides several options to encrypt your data.

Disaster recovery

Table 5. Responsibilities for disaster recovery
Task	IBM Responsibilities	Your Responsibilities
`Restore functionality for Activity Tracker` `[*]`	Automatically recover and restart Activity Tracker components after any disaster event. In case of a regional disaster, IBM Cloud service teams, who are responsible for the operations of services that generate auditing events, will point their service to Activity Tracker endpoints in the alternate region within the same regulatory boundaries.	`N/A`
`Backup {{site.data.keyword.a_short}} components`	Daily backup of the Activity Tracker infrastructure and components.	`N/A`
`Backup auditing events for Activity Tracker`	`N/A`	Configure archiving to retain a backup copy of the data.
`Backup metadata for Activity Tracker`	Backup metadata that is used by the service.	Backup the metadata such as views, dashboards, screens, parsing templates, and alerts for each auditing instance.
`Restore metadata for Activity Tracker`	Restore metadata that is used by the service.	Restore the metadata such as views, dashboards, screens, parsing templates, and alerts for each instance.

[*] Recovered and restarted service components will not have customer data reloaded.

To plan and prepare in the event of a DR scenario for Activity Tracker, see Recovering from a disaster region.