| It is critical that when the network device is at risk of failing to process audit logs as required, it take action to mitigate the failure. Audit processing failures include: software/hardware errors; failures in the audit capturing mechanisms; and audit storage capacity being reached or exceeded. Responses to audit failure depend upon the nature of the failure mode.
When availability is an overriding concern, both of the following approved actions must be performed in response to an audit failure:
(i) If the failure was caused by the lack of audit record storage capacity, the network device must continue generating audit records if possible (automatically restarting the audit service if necessary), overwriting the oldest audit records in a first-in-first-out manner.
(ii) If audit records are sent to a centralized collection server and communication with this server is lost or the server fails, the network device must queue audit records locally until communication is restored or until the audit records are retrieved manually. Upon restoration of the connection to the centralized collection server, action should be taken to synchronize the local audit data with the collection server. |
