- Monitor the health of the pipeline, not just the systems: agent heartbeat, ingestion volume per source, and storage headroom each catch a different failure.
- Route the alert to a named person with a defined response, and decide in advance what happens while logging is down — keep operating, or halt the affected activity.
3.3.4OFFICIAL STATEMENT BELOWDERIVED REQUIREMENTPENDING NIST SME REVIEW
3.3.4 — Audit failure alerting
3.3 Audit and Accountability · NIST SP 800-171 Rev. 2 · The heading label is this site's navigational shorthand; the official language is the statement below.
Official requirement statement (verbatim)
Alert in the event of an audit logging process failure.
NIST SP 800-171 Rev. 2 — Protecting CUI in Nonfederal Systems ↗NIST SP 800-171A — Assessing Security Requirements for CUI ↗Independent interpretation
What this requirement is after
Logging fails quietly — a full disk, a dead agent, an expired credential on the forwarder — and an attacker's favorite log is the one that stopped being written weeks ago. Someone must be alerted when the logging process itself breaks.
Across revisions
Carried into Rev. 3 as Response to Audit Logging Process Failures (03.03.04), with the alert timeframe and required response actions becoming organization-defined parameters.
Mapped practices
Brilliant at the Basics practices that support this requirement
No practice maps to this requirement — deliberately.
The campaign’s twenty practices are a priority list, not a control catalog, and none of them works this requirement’s substance directly. It still applies to you if it is in your contract’s scope: address it through your own implementation and the related artifacts below, and treat the absence of a mapping here as honesty, not permission to skip it.
Doing the work
Implementation considerations and evidence
- Alerting configuration for logging-process failures with the named recipient
- A record of a test or real failure alert and the response that followed
Artifacts
Templates and worksheets with a mapped relationship
No artifact in the library names this requirement yet. The library index groups everything by category and practice.
The other revision
Where this lands in Rev. 3
Provenance
Sources and review status
| Primary sources | NIST SP 800-171 Rev. 2 — Protecting CUI in Nonfederal Systems · NIST SP 800-171A — Assessing Security Requirements for CUI |
|---|---|
| Review status | Pending NIST SME review |
| Content version | 1.0 |
| Updated |