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System user dataset

Serverless Beta

Elastic Cloud Serverless projects are autoscaled environments, fully managed by Elastic and available on Elastic Cloud.

Availability

  • Beta

    This functionality is in beta and is not ready for production usage. For beta features, the design and code is less mature than official GA features and is being provided as-is with no warranties. Beta features are not subject to the support SLA of official GA features. Specific Support terms apply.

Serverless interfaces and procedures might differ from classic Elastic Stack deployments.

Stack Beta

The Elastic Stack includes Elastic's core products such as Elasticsearch, Kibana, Logstash, and Beats.

Availability

  • Beta

    This functionality is in beta and is not ready for production usage. For beta features, the design and code is less mature than official GA features and is being provided as-is with no warranties. Beta features are not subject to the support SLA of official GA features. Specific Support terms apply.

Unless stated otherwise on the page, this functionality is available when your Elastic Stack is deployed on Elastic Cloud Hosted, Elastic Cloud Enterprise, Elastic Cloud on Kubernetes, and self-managed environments.

This documentation corresponds to the latest patch available for each minor version. If you're not using the latest patch, check the release notes for changes.

Warning

This functionality is in beta and is subject to change. The design and code is less mature than official GA features and is being provided as-is with no warranties. Beta features are not subject to the support SLA of official GA features.

This is the user dataset of the system module.

It is implemented for Linux only.

Required privileges

The user dataset reads /etc/passwd and /etc/group, which are world-readable on all standard Linux distributions. No elevated privileges are required for basic operation.

When user.detect_password_changes: true is set, the dataset also reads /etc/shadow to detect password hash changes. The shadow file is readable only by root, or by the shadow group on some distributions.

Configuration Minimum privilege
detect_password_changes: false (default) None — any user can run this dataset
detect_password_changes: true Root, or membership in the shadow group
Important

When using detect_password_changes: true, the Auditbeat data directory (beat.db) stores a local hash of the shadow file. Secure this file with the same access controls as /etc/shadow itself — readable only by root.

Example dashboard

The dataset comes with a sample dashboard:

Auditbeat System User Dashboard

Fields

For a description of each field in the dataset, see the exported fields section.

Here is an example document generated by this dataset:

JSON 
{
    "@timestamp": "2017-10-12T08:05:34.853Z",
    "event": {
        "action": "user_added",
        "dataset": "user",
        "kind": "event",
        "module": "system"
    },
    "message": "New user elastic (UID: 1001, Groups: elastic,docker)",
    "service": {
        "type": "system"
    },
    "system": {
        "audit": {
            "user": {
                "dir": "/home/elastic",
                "gid": "1001",
                "group": [
                    {
                        "gid": "1001",
                        "name": "elastic"
                    },
                    {
                        "gid": "1002",
                        "name": "docker"
                    }
                ],
                "name": "elastic",
                "shell": "/bin/bash",
                "uid": "1001"
            }
        }
    },
    "user": {
        "entity_id": "FgDfgeDptvvfdX+L",
        "id": "1001",
        "name": "elastic"
    }
}