Data Access Auditing in Azure Cosmos DB

In this blog we will talk about how to set up auditing and monitor access to data stored in Azure Cosmos DB. The need to audit access to sensitive data is a common request in modern IT world. A lot of industries operate under the premise of government regulations (like HIPAA) that obligate them to have instrumentation in place that can answer questions such as who accesses sensitive data and what data that user was able to see. In Cosmos DB, the functionality for data access auditing is implemented with the help of the component called "Diagnostics Settings." At the time of writing of this article, the functionality was only supported for Core(SQL) API, however, Microsoft acknowledged to me that they were working to extend the approach to also cover other API offerings in Azure Cosmos DB.   Before going through the example, I'd like to point out that several conditions need to align in order for the approach to work. The following conditions need to be met to collect the ...