Google Inc. has announced the beta launch of a Cloud Audit Logging service that’s designed to help organizations keep track of user and administrator activity across its cloud apps and services.

Cloud Audit Logging is available on Google Compute Engine, Container Engine, Cloud DNS, Storage and Cloud Key Management Services. Companies can use the service to see who is accessing their data in the cloud, how it’s being used, where and when.

“Cloud Audit Logging offers enterprises a simple way to track activity in applications built on top of [Google Cloud Platform], and integrate logs with monitoring and logs analysis tools,” wrote Google’s product manager Joe Corkery on the company’s Cloud Platform Blog.

The tool provides two streams – an administrator activity log and a data access log generated by Google – for each product it’s integrated with. The first log contains entries for all the actions taken by administrators, while the data access log tracks all Application Programming Interface calls that read, create or modify all user-provided data in a database managed by the service. At present, Google’s BigQuery service is the only one that generates data access logs, but other services will get them soon, Corkery said.

Administrators can interact with the audit logs using a couple of different tools. First, they can be accessed at a high level using the Cloud Console Activity page for a particular service. Alternatively, they can be reached via Google’s Stackdriver Logs Viewer, Corkery said. With the second option, admins can carry out free text searches of the logs and filter results according to names, resource types or other characteristics.

An example of the audit logs on the Cloud Console Activity page.

The move is likely an effort by Google to appeal more to enterprises, which have long viewed capabilities such as audit logging, encryption, key management and access control as essential tools for any cloud service.

Google has been aggressive in its push to market itself as an alternative cloud option for enterprise buyers, and analyst firms say it’s making decent progress. According to data from Synergy Research Group, Google Cloud Platform and Microsoft Azure saw faster growth than any other major cloud provider in the third quarter.

But Google still has a long way to go to catch public cloud leader Amazon Web Services, which commands a 45 percent share of the worldwide Infrastructure-as-a-Service market. That’s more than twice the combined share of Google, Microsoft and IBM Corp.

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