- Alert on absence, not just on errors: a heartbeat check that notices a source going quiet catches more failures than waiting for a platform to report its own death.
- Decide the additional actions before the failure — buffer locally, halt, or accept the gap; escalation paths — because these are choices to make calmly, not mid-incident.
- In a small estate this can be one alert rule in the log platform plus a named recipient; the requirement is about the decision and the wiring, not a product purchase.
03.03.04OFFICIAL TITLEPENDING NIST SME REVIEW
03.03.04 — Response to Audit Logging Process Failures
03.03 Audit and Accountability · NIST SP 800-171 Rev. 3
Independent summary of the official requirement
Requires alerting organization-defined personnel or roles, within an organization-defined time period, when an audit logging process fails, and taking additional organization-defined actions in response.
Rev. 3 requirement text is multi-part and parameterized with organization-defined values, so this site summarizes rather than reproduces it. The summary is independent — read the official publication for the binding wording.
NIST SP 800-171 Rev. 3 — Protecting CUI in Nonfederal Systems ↗NIST SP 800-171A Rev. 3 — Assessing Security Requirements for CUI ↗Independent interpretation
What this requirement is after
Attackers turn logging off; disks fill; agents crash silently. When the audit trail stops being written, someone has to find out fast — this requirement makes the organization name who is alerted, how quickly, and what else happens next.
Across revisions
Carried from 3.3.4 with organization-defined parameters added: who is alerted, within what period, and what additional actions follow.
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
- The alerting configuration with its recipients and time expectations
- A test or real alert showing the path operated within the defined period
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 came from in Rev. 2
Provenance
Sources and review status
| Primary sources | NIST SP 800-171 Rev. 3 — Protecting CUI in Nonfederal Systems · NIST SP 800-171A Rev. 3 — Assessing Security Requirements for CUI |
|---|---|
| Review status | Pending NIST SME review |
| Content version | 1.0 |
| Updated |