Installing Percona Audit Plugin on MySQL 5.6.21 community server

To be absolutely clear this plugin is alternative to the MySQL Enterprise Audit Plugin made by Percona.

This plugin is a part of Percona 5.6 version, so you can download the latest 5.6 version from http://www.percona.com ind extract .so file from there. After that you need to find your plugin folder:

 mysql> show global variables like '%plugin%';
+---------------+--------------------------+
| Variable_name | Value                    |
+---------------+--------------------------+
| plugin_dir    | /usr/lib64/mysql/plugin/ |
+---------------+--------------------------+
1 row in set (0.00 sec)

and copy the  audit_log.so there. To instal the plugin:

mysql> INSTALL PLUGIN audit_log SONAME 'audit_log.so';
Query OK, 0 rows affected (0.00 sec)

Now, options we can tweak here or at least most important of them:

• audit_log_buffer_size; this buffer is used to cache the queries (for asynchronous operation).
• audit_log_policy; we can log all queries or MySQL logins only (very useful if we only need to audit MySQL connections)
• audit_log_format Permitted values are OLD, NEW, CSV and JSON (default OLD), more info here
• audit_log_strategy; All options are listed in the documentation page:
  

  Dynamic Variable	No
  	Permitted Values
  	Type	enumeration
  	Default	ASYNCHRONOUS
  	Valid Values	ASYNCHRONOUS
  		PERFORMANCE
  		SEMISYNCHRONOUS
  		SYNCHRONOUS

MySQL utilities provide a useful tool, mysqlauditgrep, to search and/or grep the logs file but you need to comment out rows 171 and 172 in file /usr/lib/python2.7/site-packages/mysql/utilities/common/audit_log_parser.py

#                if self.header_rows:
#                    record['SERVER_ID'] = self.header_rows[0]['SERVER_ID']

to make it works. Also you need to remove the first empty row in audit.log file.