What evidence do auditors commonly ask for on A.8.15 Logging?

Statement of Applicability entry for control A.8.15, showing inclusion or justified exclusion, implementation status and the risks it treats; The topic-specific logging policy defining purposes, events to be logged, fields captured, retention and protection; Log source inventory showing which systems send which event types to central logging or SIEM; Configuration evidence that logs are tamper-protected (append-only storage, hashing, restricted deletion) and that administrators cannot erase their own activity; SIEM correlation rules, use cases and alert tuning records, and evidence of regular log review.

What is the most common gap auditors find on A.8.15?

Critical systems or cloud services are not sending logs to central collection

ISO/IEC 27001:2022 · Technological controls

`A.8.15` Logging

Logs recording activity, exceptions, faults and other events of interest are to be generated, kept, protected and analysed. Purpose (stated in ISO/IEC 27002:2022): records events, generates evidence, protects log integrity, identifies security events and supports investigations. As an Annex A reference control, it is compared with the controls determined in risk treatment (6.1.3 c) and recorded in the Statement of Applicability as included or excluded, with the justification and implementation status (6.1.3 d); implementation guidance is ISO/IEC 27002:2022 8.15.

Source: ISO/IEC 27001:2022, A.8.15. 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 ISO/IEC 27001:2022 in the compliance library.

Clauses 4 to 10 are the management-system requirements: none of them can be excluded when an organisation claims conformity. The 93 Annex A controls are a reference set: one may be excluded with a justification in the Statement of Applicability. Certification bodies assess conformity; the evidence lists here are what auditors commonly ask for, not a list the standard prescribes.

artefacts

held by a system

at each review

easy

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

The topic-specific logging policy defining purposes, events to be logged, fields captured, retention and protection · SIEM / log platform
Configuration evidence that logs are tamper-protected (append-only storage, hashing, restricted deletion) and that administrators cannot erase their own activity · SIEM / log platform
SIEM correlation rules, use cases and alert tuning records, and evidence of regular log review · SIEM / log platform

periodic reviewEvidence produced at each review

none for this control

governing documentDocuments that govern the control

Statement of Applicability entry for control A.8.15, showing inclusion or justified exclusion, implementation status and the risks it treats · Policy repository / GRC workspace
Log source inventory showing which systems send which event types to central logging or SIEM · Policy repository / GRC workspace

First move

Automate the pull from your SIEM / log platform. Retention and alert rules exported from the SIEM; review evidence is the closed-alert record with reviewer and time.

Common gaps auditors find

Critical systems or cloud services are not sending logs to central collection
Administrators can delete or disable logging on systems they manage
Logs overwrite themselves when storage fills, losing evidence
Logs are collected but nobody analyses them until after an incident

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

A.8.14 Redundancy of information processing facilities · A.8.16 Monitoring activities