Logging BLAST server access and genomic data download

Sometimes its helpful to check who has been doing what and when.

At the simplest level, a SequenceServer Cloud history page shows all BLAST searches performed.

SequenceServer maintains a record of your BLAST history allowing you to go back to previous BLAST runs.

Audit trails and access logging

But sometimes more logging is needed. For example:

For those use cases, SequenceServer Cloud can provide an audit trail log that records every action performed by every user. This includes:

SequenceServer logs the access to the account. This helps users manage who is using the account and what they are running.

Additionally, audit logging can track errors. This allows you to easily spot and resolve issues that arise.

SequenceServer logs errors making it easy for you to see and record errors and identify the causes of BLAST run issues.

Currently, it’s in JSON format as this is easy to parse and query with other tools. See below for some examples.

Access logging

{"app":"Edit","datetime":"2023-09-19T11:17:27Z","user":"admin_user@mycompany.com","user_agent":"Mozilla/5.0 (Macintosh; Intel Mac OS X 10_15_7) AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/116.0.0.0 Safari/537.36","origin_ip":"192.168.65.1","method":"GET","path":"/edit/","params":{}}

Administrator logging: Renaming database

{"app":"Edit","datetime":"2023-09-19T11:17:20Z","user":"admin_user@mycompany.com","user_agent":"Mozilla/5.0 (Macintosh; Intel Mac OS X 10_15_7) AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/116.0.0.0 Safari/537.36","origin_ip":"192.168.65.1","method":"POST","path":"/edit/databases","params":{"action":"rename_database","id":"1ad08df692d62f41ee5a41dfdbda9c0b2f14a9171b0b8c831a1675e9a3391d6d","file_name":"Hereis_assembly_one.2022-04.fa","new_display_name":"2022-04 assembly"}}

Administrator logging: Removing a user

{"app":"Edit","datetime":"2023-09-19T11:17:47Z","user":"admin_user@mycompany.com","user_agent":"Mozilla/5.0 (Macintosh; Intel Mac OS X 10_15_7) AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/116.0.0.0 Safari/537.36","origin_ip":"192.168.65.1","method":"POST","path":"/edit/users","params":{"action":"remove_user","email":"y.wurm@qmul.ac.uk"}}

User logging: Submitting BLAST job

{"app":"SequenceServer","datetime":"2023-09-19T11:20:51Z","user":"admin_user@mycompany.com","user_agent":"Mozilla/5.0 (Macintosh; Intel Mac OS X 10_15_7) AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/116.0.0.0 Safari/537.36","origin_ip":"192.168.65.1","method":"POST","path":"/","params":{"sequence":"> ACGTACGTACGTACGTACGTACGTACGTACGTACGT","databases":["0ab76d606d74fac1ec4e755f6b1597d6","c354ca942b1fac4d8a989525d667747c","5fe2f24ba7dfbdf23b0bfc1e8a2e3a22"],"advanced":"-evalue 1e-5","method":"tblastn"}}

User logging: Downloading hits from BLAST results page

{"app":"SequenceServer","datetime":"2023-09-19T11:23:05Z","user":"admin_user@mycompany.com","user_agent":"Mozilla/5.0 (Macintosh; Intel Mac OS X 10_15_7) AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/116.0.0.0 Safari/537.36","origin_ip":"192.168.65.1","method":"POST","path":"/get_sequence","params":{"sequence_ids":"SI2.2.0_05000","database_ids":"5b0ce9b3131bacf6fa1855d1b0f5b584"}}

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