Where is the history for the knife executing on the open-source chef server?

Question

For example, after I run a knife command of 'knife cookbook upload cookbook_name' from a chef workstation or somewhere, where can I find the history or log about who sent the knife command and when, and what the command is? I need to monitor all the knife behaviors on the chef server side centrally.. How to do that?

Answer 1

Unfortunately this information isn't logged by Chef. There might be some partial logs of what happened and when in /var/log/chef/chef-server.log file but in general there isn't much in the way of auditing and logging at the level of API calls.

It's a bit of a shame, as sometimes it would be very handy to know who did what and when, especially when troubleshooting some existing Chef problem or during a post-mortem.

Chef server is a Rack application though, so it should be possible to use some rack middleware to do some more serious logging.