Monitor HashiCorp Vault metrics and logs

HashiCorp Vault is a tool that helps manage, store, and secure access to secrets such as encryption keys, credentials, certificates, and tokens. It has been adopted by organizations like Adobe, Hulu, and Shopify since its release in 2015. Vault enables security operators to encrypt all of their secrets, distribute them across hybrid environments, apply fine-grained access controls, and audit activity to see who has requested data. Built to operate in zero-trust networks, Vault takes an application identity-centric approach, meaning that it authenticates clients against trusted sources of identity (e.g., Google Cloud, GitHub, Okta) before granting them access to data. Teams can deploy Vault on platforms like Kubernetes and AWS to streamline secret management operations across their entire stack or take advantage of HashiCorp Cloud Platform’s fully managed products. Monitoring the health and performance of your Vault deployment is crucial for protecting applications and infrastructure against potential attacks. In this blog post, we discuss how you can gain visibility into the health and performance of your Vault deployment with metrics and logs. We also explore how to use built-in Vault monitoring tools to view these metrics in detail. The general architecture of Vault consists of several components, including its core, storage backend, audit devices, and replication mechanisms. Monitoring various parts of Vault's architecture is essential for keeping your Vault clusters healthy and running optimally. In this post, we cover the following topics: 1. Overview of Vault logs: We discuss two types of logs produced by Vault - server logs and audit logs. Server logs record all activities that occurred on each server, while audit logs record the requests and responses of every interaction with Vault. 2. Built-in tools for collecting and viewing Vault metrics and logs: In Part 2 of this series, we introduce the built-in tools you can use to collect and view Vault metrics and logs. We also provide examples of how these tools work in practice. 3. Comprehensive visibility into Vault using Datadog: In Part 3, we show you how to use Datadog to analyze your logs - and seamlessly correlate them with metrics and other data from across your stack to get comprehensive visibility into your applications. We also demonstrate how Datadog Cloud SIEM automatically analyzes Vault audit logs to ensure that your Vault cluster is secure. By monitoring various parts of Vault's architecture, you can ensure the health and performance of your Vault deployment, protect your applications and infrastructure against potential attacks, and gain comprehensive visibility into your entire stack.