What evidence do auditors commonly ask for on OPS-15 Logging and Monitoring - Accountability?

Sample log record showing tenant identifier, acting principal, source address and action; Documented forensic acquisition procedure naming the tooling used; Description of the packet capture or snapshot capability for infrastructure components; Case file from a past investigation attributing actions to a named individual.

What is the most common gap auditors find on OPS-15?

Shared administrative accounts making attribution to an individual impossible

BSI C5 (121-criteria catalogue) · C5: Operations

`OPS-15` Logging and Monitoring - Accountability

Produce log data that identifies user access unambiguously at tenant level to support forensic analysis after a security incident, and provide interfaces for conducting forensic analysis and taking backups of infrastructure components and their network communication.

Source: BSI C5 (121-criteria catalogue), OPS-15. The statement above is our statement of the clause, read from the published text and cited so you can check it against the official text, not the instrument verbatim. Open BSI C5 (121-criteria catalogue) in the compliance library.

The edition of the catalogue is not stamped here; check the edition your attestation is issued against.

artefacts

held by a system

at each review

moderate

to go live

SIEM / log platform

where the evidence lives

teal = a system already holds it · olive = produced at each review. To go live: easy when half or more of the artefacts are already held by a system, moderate from a quarter to a half, hard below a quarter.

These are the artefacts auditors commonly ask for on this requirement, our guidance rather than text from the standard. Your assessor decides what is sufficient in your context, and asks for samples across the period when a report covers one.

system holds itEvidence a system already holds

Sample log record showing tenant identifier, acting principal, source address and action · SIEM / log platform

periodic reviewEvidence produced at each review

none for this control

governing documentDocuments that govern the control

Documented forensic acquisition procedure naming the tooling used · Policy repository / GRC workspace
Description of the packet capture or snapshot capability for infrastructure components · Policy repository / GRC workspace
Case file from a past investigation attributing actions to a named individual · Policy repository / GRC workspace

First move

Start with the 1 of 4 artefacts that already live in a system (SIEM / log platform); keep the periodic reviews but log each one as a dated record with a named reviewer.

Common gaps auditors find

Shared administrative accounts making attribution to an individual impossible
Tenant identifier absent from records produced by shared platform services
No means of capturing volatile memory or traffic before a host is rebuilt
Investigator activity itself unlogged, so the investigation cannot be reconstructed

Do this for your whole sheet

Paste the rows you run your controls from and get this mapping for every control at once, with the periodic-review ones flagged and a first move per row. No account for the first run.

Build my evidence sheet

OPS-14 Logging and Monitoring - Storage of the Logging Data · OPS-16 Logging and Monitoring - Configuration