ActionTrail will no longer support showing associated resources for read events from 23:59:59 on August 28, 2020.

Background

A read event in ActionTrail is a record of a read operation that a user performs on Alibaba Cloud resources. A read operation does not add, delete, or modify cloud resources and configurations. It only obtains information about the target cloud services and resources. For example, DescribeInstances, DescribeRegions, and GetInstanceScreenshot are all read events.

Associated resources are the resources that an operation involves. To view the information about the associated resources of an event in the ActionTrail console, click History Search in the left-side navigation pane, click the plus sign (+) to the left of the target event record, and then view the information in the Associated Resources section. If a trail is created to deliver events to the specified Log Service Logstore or Object Storage Service (OSS) bucket, you can view information about associated resources in the referencedResources field.

After the change, associated resources will no longer be shown in the ActionTrail console and the referencedResources field will become empty.

Reasons for change

  • Little significance: In operations auditing, the information about the resources on which a read operation is performed has little significance, because a read operation does not modify the configurations of cloud resources.
  • Low feasibility: In ActionTrail, most read events process a large number of associated resources at the same time, making it infeasible to view and audit associated resources of read events.
  • High storage costs: Read operations are frequently performed on the cloud. If you create a trail to deliver events to the specified Log Service Logstore or OSS bucket, extra storage space is needed to store the records of associated resources for read events. This will increase the storage costs.

To provide critical and insightful event information in a more concise way, ActionTrail will no longer support showing associated resources for read events.

Impacts

  • When you view the detailed information about a read event on the History Search page in the ActionTrail console, no resource information will appear in the Associated Resources section. If you click View Event, you will find the referencedResources field empty in the event logs.
  • If you create a trail to deliver events to the specified Log Service Logstore or OSS bucket, the referencedResources field will be empty in the event logs.

We apologize for any inconvenience caused by this change. The ActionTrail team will speed up the upgrade and strive to provide you with more stable and robust audit services.