The first time you see a strange spike in your traffic logs, it’s already too late to guess. You need to know who did what, when, and why—without digging through broken trails or missing records. That’s where Audit Logs in Identity-Aware Proxy stop being optional and start being critical.
Identity-Aware Proxy (IAP) protects your apps and resources by controlling access based on a user’s identity. But the real power comes when you enable and tune its audit logs. Those logs are proof. They give you a complete record of authentication events, access attempts, and policy changes. They’re your defense against blind spots and your key to fast incident response.
Good audit logging in IAP means every action is visible in Cloud Audit Logs. You can trace every request to the authenticated identity. You can track the original IP. You can filter for failed attempts to spot attack patterns before they become breaches. Done right, audit logs give you full visibility without drowning you in noise.
To get there, configure IAP to send logs to Cloud Logging. Target the Admin Activity logs for changes to your IAP settings—this shows you every modification to access policies. Then pull Data Access logs to see user activity on the protected applications themselves. Stream those logs to BigQuery for long-term analysis, or to Pub/Sub for real-time alerts. Keep retention policies aligned with your compliance requirements, and lock down who can access the logs themselves.