How to enable auditing and log all CRUD operations in MongoDB Node App?

Question

I have a node mongo app. Now I want to show audit trail for some specific crud events which are happening in the application.

What would be the best approach for solving this problem ?

I have considered of creating a new collection and service which would be called in each method in node app for logging the operations.

Answer 1

It's better to use a different schema having all the logs that you want to store for particular actions.

// schema
var schema = new Schema({
    actionType: {type: String, require: true},
    userId: { type: Schema.Types.ObjectId, required: true },
    userType: { type: String, required: true },
    message: { type: String, required: true },
    createdAt: { type: Date, default: Date.now },

}, options);

Here you can log your activity logs with

What action have been taken. Which user. And the message that you want to store with that action etc.

Answer 2

You are talking about 'triggering'. But unfortunately "MongoDB does not support triggers".

For solving your issue simply create another collection and store the log information into that collection.

Reference :

• does mongodb have the properties such as trigger and procedure in a relational database?
• How to listen for changes to a MongoDB collection?

Answer 3

If you are using mongoose module then there is method for logging all query.It'll log all queries on console.

mongoose.set('debug', true);

If you want to log in a file then use callback for this method

mongoose.set('debug', function (coll, method, query, doc [, options]) {
 //do your thing
});