Access authentication logs

Access authentication logs help you track who accessed your protected applications, when they accessed them, and whether they were allowed in. Use these logs to investigate suspicious login attempts, audit user activity, or troubleshoot access issues.

Cloudflare Access generates two types of audit logs:

Authentication audit logs record each login attempt (successful or failed) by a user or service to an Access application.
Per-request audit logs record individual HTTP requests that authenticated users make to protected application paths and infrastructure targets.

Authentication logs

Cloudflare Access logs an authentication event whenever a user or service attempts to log in to an application, whether the attempt succeeds or not.

Identity-based authentication refers to login attempts that were evaluated based on who the user is — for example, their email address, identity provider (IdP) group, SAML group, or OIDC claim.

Non-identity authentication refers to login attempts that were evaluated based on context rather than user identity — for example, IP address, device posture, country, valid certificate, or service token.

Identity-based authentication

To view logs for identity-based authentication events:

In the Cloudflare dashboard ↗, go to Zero Trust > Insights > Logs.
Select Access authentication logs.

Access authentication logs use an updated log viewer with enhanced filtering capabilities. To switch to the classic view, select Return to old logs.
(Optional) Filter the logs that display in the log viewer. You can filter logs by their timestamp and event details (such as the Access application, user email, policy decision, and more).

Querying for fewer fields improves log loading performance.
Select an individual timestamp to investigate the event in more detail.

The Access authentication logs API endpoint provides a custom URL to export audit log events for your account.

Required API token permissions

At least one of the following token permissions is required:

Access: Audit Logs Read

curl "https://api.cloudflare.com/client/v4/accounts/$ACCOUNT_ID/access/logs/access_requests?limit=25&direction=desc&since=2020-07-01T05%3A20%3A00Z&until=2020-10-01T05%3A20%3A00Z" \
  --request GET \
  --header "X-Auth-Email: $CLOUDFLARE_EMAIL" \
  --header "X-Auth-Key: $CLOUDFLARE_API_KEY"

{
  "success": true,
  "errors": [],
  "messages": [],
  "result": [
    {
      "user_email": "michelle@example.com",
      "ip_address": "198.41.129.166",
      "app_uid": "df7e2w5f-02b7-4d9d-af26-8d1988fca630",
      "app_domain": "test.example.com/admin",
      "action": "login",
      "connection": "saml",
      "allowed": false,
      "created_at": "2014-01-01T05:20:00.12345Z",
      "ray_id": "187d944c61940c77"
    }
  ]
}

Explanation of the fields

Identity-based authentication logs contain the following fields:

Basic information

Field	Description
App	Name of the Access application.
User email	Email address of the authenticating user.
User ID	Unique identifier (UUID) of the authenticating user.
IP address	IP address of the authenticating user.
App UID	Unique identifier (UUID) of the Access application.
App domain	URL of the Access application.
App type	Specifies the type of Access application: self-hosted, browser SSH, browser VNC, browser RDP, SaaS, or infrastructure.
Event	Type of authentication event, such as a login attempt.
Connection	Identity provider used to authenticate (for example, `saml`, `onetimepin`, `google-apps`).
Allow	Whether the authentication attempt was allowed (`true`) or denied (`false`).
Request time	Timestamp of the authentication event.
Ray ID	A unique identifier for every request through Cloudflare. Useful for tracing a specific request through Cloudflare logs.
Country	Country associated with the user's IP address.

Infrastructure applications

Cloudflare Access logs the following information when the user authenticates to an infrastructure application:

Field	Description
Hostname	Hostname of the infrastructure target.
Target ID	UUID of the infrastructure target.
SSH user	The UNIX user, such as `root`, that the authenticating user specified when connecting to the infrastructure target.
SSH logs	SSH commands that the user ran on the target. Requires configuring an SSH encryption key before the session begins.

Non-identity authentication

To retrieve logs for non-identity authentication events, use the GraphQL Analytics API. These logs are not available in the Cloudflare One dashboard.

Per-request logs

Users who have authenticated through Access have access to authorized URL paths for the duration of their session. Cloudflare provides several ways to audit these requests.

Using Cloudflare Logs

Enterprise customers have access to detailed logs of requests on their Cloudflare dashboard. Enterprise customers also have access to Cloudflare's Logpush service, which can be configured from the Cloudflare dashboard or API. For more information about Cloudflare HTTP and infrastructure logging, refer to Cloudflare Logs.

Once a member of your team authenticates to reach an HTTP resource behind Access, Cloudflare generates a JSON Web Token (JWT) for that user that contains their SSO identity. Cloudflare signs this token using RS256 (RSA Signature with SHA-256), an asymmetric algorithm, and makes the public key available so that you can verify the token is authentic.

When a user requests a URL, Access appends the user identity from that token as a request header, which Cloudflare logs as the request passes through the network. Your team can collect these logs in your preferred third-party Security information and event management (SIEM) software or storage destination by using Cloudflare Logpush. When enabled with the Access user identity field, the logs export to your systems as JSON similar to the example below.

{
   "ClientIP": "198.51.100.206",
   "ClientRequestHost": "jira.widgetcorp.tech",
   "ClientRequestMethod": "GET",
   "ClientRequestURI": "/secure/Dashboard/jspa",
   "ClientRequestUserAgent":"Mozilla/5.0 (Macintosh; Intel Mac OS X 10_14_6) AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/78.0.3904.87 Safari/537.36",
   "EdgeEndTimestamp": "2019-11-10T09:51:07Z",
   "EdgeResponseBytes": 4600,
   "EdgeResponseStatus": 200,
   "EdgeStartTimestamp": "2019-11-10T09:51:07Z",
   "RayID": "5y1250bcjd621y99",
   "RequestHeaders":{"cf-access-user":"srhea"}
},
{
   "ClientIP": "198.51.100.206",
   "ClientRequestHost": "jira.widgetcorp.tech",
   "ClientRequestMethod": "GET",
   "ClientRequestURI": "/browse/EXP-12",
   "ClientRequestUserAgent":"Mozilla/5.0 (Macintosh; Intel Mac OS X 10_14_6) AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/78.0.3904.87 Safari/537.36",
   "EdgeEndTimestamp": "2019-11-10T09:51:27Z",
   "EdgeResponseBytes": 4570,
   "EdgeResponseStatus": 200,
   "EdgeStartTimestamp": "2019-11-10T09:51:27Z",
   "RayID": "yzrCqUhRd6DVz72a",
   "RequestHeaders":{"cf-access-user":"srhea"}
}

Using the `cf-access-user` field

In addition to the HTTP request fields available in Cloudflare Enterprise logging, requests made to applications behind Access include the cf-access-user field, which contains the user identity string. This offers another tool for auditing user behavior. To add the cf-access-user field to your HTTP request logs, you must add it as a custom field. Refer to Custom fields for instructions.

Keep in mind that Access does not log all interactions. Per-request audit logs can indicate that a specific user visited domain.com/admin and then domain.com/admin/panel, but the logs only capture interactions that result in a new HTTP request. Purely client-side interactions that do not generate server requests are not logged.