IBM Cloud Docs
Scenarios

Scenarios

Check out these sample scenarios to learn how to set up your account so that you can manage auditing events by using IBM Cloud® Activity Tracker Event Routing.

Financial Services (FS) Validated EU-managed account Enterprise account Global events Data lake scenario

  • Forward your activity event data to IBM Cloud Object Storage for IBM Cloud Financial Services compliance. See Financial Services (FS) Validated scenario.

  • Improve data residency compliance by keeping data at-rest within specific locations such as the EU-managed locations. See EU-managed account scenario.

  • Consolidate Activity Tracker Event Routing data to the account and region of your primary operations. You can also route auditing events to multiple locations. See Enterprise account scenario.

  • Manage global events in an account and route them to the location of your choice. See Global events scenario.

  • Route data to a Data Lake for analytics. See Data lake scenario.

  • Route data to

Financial Services (FS) Validated scenario

Forward your activity event data to IBM Cloud Object Storage for IBM Cloud for Financial Services compliance.

If you require a solution that is Finantial Services (FS) Validated, you can run your business in IBM Cloud in any of the supported regions such as us-south, us-east, eu-de, and eu-gb.

Therefore, to configure Activity Tracker Event Routing for your account, you must define your account settings, targets and routes as follows:

  • You must set your account Metadata region primary setting to any of the supported FS validated regions in IBM Cloud. For example, you can set it to us-east.

  • You must set your account Permitted target region to the set of FS Validated regions where you operate. For example, you can set it to: us-south,us-east,eu-gb,eu-de. This setting will prevent administrators from creating targets in non-allowed locations.

  • You must set your account Private api endpoint only setting to only allow administrators to use private endpoints to manage the Activity Tracker Event Routing configuration.

  • You can define 1 or more targets of type cloud-object-storage to store your auditing events.

    You cannot define targets of type logdna.

    You can define a cloud-object-storage target in any of the permitted regions.

  • You must define the Default targets setting to configure up to 2 default targets that are used to route auditing events that are not explicitly managed in the account's routing rules. For example, if you have an enterprise account, you can define 1 target in a different account to route auditing events from any child accounts in your Enterprise, and a local target in the account to keep a copy local to the account.

  • You must define 1 route to configure the account to route global auditing events and location-based auditing events.

    For example, to capture auditing events across all supported locations in a single target within the account, you can define a route with the following rule:

    [
      {
         "locations":[
            "global",
            "eu-de",
            "eu-gb",
            "us-south",
            "us-east"
         ],
         "target_ids":[
            "<COS TARGET ID 1>"
         ]
      }
    ]
    

    For example, to capture auditing events across all supported locations within the account and in a different account, you can define a route with the following rule:

    [
      {
         "locations":[
            "global",
            "eu-de",
            "eu-gb",
            "us-south",
            "us-east"
         ],
         "target_ids":[
            "<COS TARGET ID 1>",
            "<COS TARGET ID 2>"
         ]
      }
    ]
    

For example, your account settings would look like:

ibmcloud atracker setting get
OK
IBM Cloud Activity Tracker settings
Metadata region primary:                             us-east
Default targets:                                     [<COS TARGET ID 1>,<COS TARGET ID 2>]
Permitted target regions:                            [us-south,us-east,eu-gb,eu-de]
Private api endpoint only:                           true
API version:                                         2

and your targets would look like:

ibmcloud atracker target ls
Listing IBM Cloud Activity Tracker targets for all regions...
OK
Name                       ID                                     Region   Type                   Service to Service Enabled   CreatedAt                  UpdatedAt
target-cos                 <COS TARGET ID 1>                      eu-de    cloud_object_storage   true                         2022-05-16T17:16:05.234Z   2022-05-16T17:16:05.234Z
target-cross-acc-cos       <COS TARGET ID 2>                      eu-de    cloud_object_storage   true                         2022-05-16T17:16:05.721Z   2022-05-16T17:16:05.721Z

EU-managed account scenario

Improve data residency compliance by keeping data at-rest within EU-managed locations.

If you require a solution that is EU-managed compliant, you must run your business in IBM Cloud in the Frankfurt (eu-de) region, which is the only supported location that is EU-managed compliant.

Therefore, to configure Activity Tracker Event Routing for your account, you must define your account settings, targets and routes as follows:

  • You must set your account Metadata region primary setting to Frankfurt (eu-de).

  • You must set your account Permitted target region to eu-de. This setting will prevent administrators from creating targets in non-allowed locations.

  • You can set your account Private api endpoint only setting to specifiy whether you allow administrators to use public endpoints, private endpoints, or both. This setting indicate the type of endpoints that are allowed to manage the Activity Tracker Event Routing configuration.

  • You can define 1 or more targets of type cloud-object-storage or logdna to store your auditing events. These targets must be located in Frankfurt.

    You can define a cloud-object-storage target in Frankfurt to store auditing events for long term storage.

    You can define a logdna target in Frankfurt to allow administrators to graphically search, and monitor auditing events, as well as define alerts.

  • You can define the Default targets setting to configure up to 2 default targets that are used to collect auditing events that are not explicitly managed in the account's routing rules. For example, you can configure a cloud-object-storage target and a logdna target. You can setup alerts in the logdna target to get notified when events that are generated in non-eu managed locations in your account are reported.

  • You must define 1 route to configure the account to route global auditing events and location-based auditing events that are generated in Frankfurt to the targets specified in the routing rule.

    [
      {
         "locations":[
            "global",
            "eu-de"
         ],
         "target_ids":[
            "<COS TARGET ID>",
            "<LOGDNA TARGET ID>"
         ]
      }
    ]
    

For example, your account settings would look like:

ibmcloud atracker setting get
OK
IBM Cloud Activity Tracker settings
Metadata region primary:                             eu-de
Default targets:                                     [<LOGDNA TARGET ID>,<COS TARGET ID>]
Permitted target regions:                            [eu-de]
Private api endpoint only:                           false
API version:                                         2

and your targets would look like:

ibmcloud atracker target ls
Listing IBM Cloud Activity Tracker targets for all regions...
OK
Name            ID                                     Region   Type                   Service to Service Enabled   CreatedAt                  UpdatedAt
target-logdna   <LOGDNA TARGET ID>                     eu-de    logdna                 -                            2022-05-16T17:03:00.968Z   2022-05-16T17:03:00.968Z
target-cos      <COS TARGET ID>                        eu-de    cloud_object_storage   true                         2022-05-16T17:16:05.721Z   2022-05-16T17:16:05.721Z

Enterprise account scenario

Consolidate Activity Tracker Event Routing data to the account and region of your primary operations. You can also route auditing events to multiple locations.

For example, if you have an Enterprise with multiple child accounts, you can run your business in IBM Cloud across multiple regions such as us-south, us-east, eu-de, au-syd, and eu-gb.

  • You run development in the us-south region.
  • You run QA in the eu-gb region.
  • You run production in the eu-de and us-east regions.
  • You only allow private endpoints to operate in IBM Cloud.
  • You only want to collect auditing events from your production regions.

In this scenario, to configure Activity Tracker Event Routing for your account, you must define your account settings, targets and routes as follows:

  • You must set your account Metadata region primary setting to any of the supported Activity Tracker Event Routing regions in IBM Cloud. For example, you can set it to us-east.

  • You must set your account Permitted target region to the regions where you operate. For example, you can set it to: us-south,us-east,eu-gb,eu-de. This setting will prevent administrators from creating targets in non-allowed locations.

  • You must set your account Private api endpoint only setting to only allow administrators to use private endpoints to manage the Activity Tracker Event Routing configuration.

  • You can define 1 or more targets of type cloud-object-storage or logdna to store your auditing events.

  • You can define the Default targets setting to configure up to 2 default targets that are used to collect auditing events that are not explicitly managed in the account's routing rules. For example, you can define 1 target in a different account and route auditing events from any child accounts in your Enterprise to this target. You can also define a local target in the account to keep a copy local to the child account.

  • You must define 1 route to configure the account to route global auditing events and location-based auditing events.

    For example, to capture auditing events across all supported locations in a single target within the account, you can define a route with the following rule:

    [
      {
         "locations":[
            "global",
            "eu-de",
            "us-east"
         ],
         "target_ids":[
            "<COS TARGET ID 1>"
         ]
      }
    ]
    

    Because you have defined default targets in the account configuration settings, auditing events that are not explicitly managed in the account's routing rules are routed to these default targets.

    To drop auditing events for the regions where you run development and QA, you can add the following rule:

    [
      {
         "locations":[
            "global",
            "eu-de",
            "us-east"
         ],
         "target_ids":[
            "<COS TARGET ID 1>"
         ]
      },
      {
         "locations":[
            "eu-gb",
            "us-south"
         ],
         "target_ids":[
         ]
      }
    ]
    

    If what you need is to capture auditing events across all supported locations in the account that generates the events and also in a different account where you collect events from all your Enterprise accounts, you can define a route with the following rule:

    [
      {
         "locations":[
            "global",
            "eu-de",
            "us-east"
         ],
         "target_ids":[
            "<COS TARGET ID 1>",
            "<COS TARGET ID 2>"
         ]
      }
    ]
    

Your account settings would look like:

ibmcloud atracker setting get
OK
IBM Cloud Activity Tracker settings
Metadata region primary:                             us-east
Default targets:                                     [<COS TARGET ID 1>,<COS TARGET ID 2>]
Permitted target regions:                            [us-south,us-east,eu-gb,eu-de]
Private api endpoint only:                           true
API version:                                         2

and your targets would look like:

ibmcloud atracker target ls
Listing IBM Cloud Activity Tracker targets for all regions...
OK
Name                       ID                                     Region   Type                   Service to Service Enabled   CreatedAt                  UpdatedAt
target-cos                 <COS TARGET ID 1>                      eu-de    cloud_object_storage   true                         2022-05-16T17:16:05.234Z   2022-05-16T17:16:05.234Z
target-cross-acc-cos       <COS TARGET ID 2>                      eu-de    cloud_object_storage   true                         2022-05-16T17:16:05.721Z   2022-05-16T17:16:05.721Z

Global events scenario

Manage global events in an account and route them to the location of your choice.

If you manage auditing events through Activity Tracker Event Routing event search instances in the account, global events are automatically routed to the instance in Frankfurt. However, you can configure Activity Tracker Event Routing to configure the Activity Tracker Event Routing instance of your choice where you can manage global events.

For example,

  • You run your business in IBM Cloud across multiple regions such as us-south, us-east, ca-tor, au-syd, and br-sao.
  • You want to collect global events in a different location from Frankfurt. Notice that Frankfurt is the location where global events are available if you configure Activity Tracker Event Routing event search in the account to manage auditing events in the account.

In this example, to configure Activity Tracker Event Routing for your account, you must define your account settings, targets and routes as follows:

  • You must set your account Metadata region primary setting to any of the supported Activity Tracker Event Routing regions in IBM Cloud. For example, you can set it to us-east.

  • You must set your account Permitted target region to the region where you want to define the target resource that indicates the Activity Tracker Event Routing instance where global events are routed. Consider setting it to the same location as the metadata region.

  • You must define 1 target of type logdna to store your global auditing events.

  • You must not set a default target to allow the default flows that route events for all regions to continue routing auditing events to each Activity Tracker Event Routing instance in each region.

  • You must define 1 route to configure the account to route global auditing events to the Activity Tracker Event Routing instance of your choice.

    For example, you can define a route with the following rule:

    [
      {
         "locations":[
            "global"
         ],
         "target_ids":[
            "<LOGDNA TARGET ID 1>"
         ]
      }
    ]
    

Your account settings would look like:

ibmcloud atracker setting get
OK
IBM Cloud Activity Tracker settings
Metadata region primary:                             us-east
Default targets:                                     []
Permitted target regions:                            [us-east]
Private api endpoint only:                           false
API version:                                         2

Your target would look like:

ibmcloud atracker target ls
Listing IBM Cloud Activity Tracker targets for all regions...
OK
Name                       ID                                     Region     Type                   Service to Service Enabled   CreatedAt                  UpdatedAt
target-logdna              <LOGDNA TARGET ID 1>                   us-east    logdna                 -                            2022-05-16T17:16:05.234Z   2022-05-16T17:16:05.234Z

Data Lake scenario

You can choose any of the following options to send auditing events to a data lake:

  • Configure your account to route auditing events to Activity Tracker Event Routing hosted event search instances. Stream the events to Event Streams, and then, send them to a data lake. You can filter the data to be streamed to the data lake.

    Simplify the Activity Tracker Event Routing hosted event search configuration so only 1 instance needs to be configured to feed auditing events to Event Streams.

  • Configure Activity Tracker Event Routing in your account to route auditing events directly to an IBM Cloud Object Storage data lake.

    Use this option for Financial Services Cloud workloads where end-to-end compliance is required.