go-audit
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Alternative to the auditd daemon that connects to the Linux kernel via netlink and outputs audit logs as JSON.
Summary
go-audit is an open-source daemon, licensed under MIT, that replaces the auditd process on Linux to collect kernel audit events via netlink and emit them as structured JSON instead of auditd's native log format. It runs as a background service on each host, built from source with Go and installed via the examples in its contrib folder, then feeds its output to syslog, a local file, Graylog2, or stdout through a pluggable pipeline. This puts it in the hands of detection engineers and SOCSOCA security operations center, the team or function that monitors threats, investigates alerts and coordinates incident response. Its work can be internal, outsourced or shared. teams who need host audit data in a format their log pipeline can parse without writing a separate translation layer. Its README frames it directly as an alternative to auditd, aimed at teams already using that daemon but wanting JSON output and a faster, non-blocking design. First committed in 2015, it remains active with 20 contributors and a release roughly two months ago.
Alternative to the auditd daemon that connects to the Linux kernel via netlink and outputs audit logs as JSON.
How go-audit helps
What is actually happening on this host at the kernel level right now?
connects to the kernel over netlink and turns the raw audit events into structured JSON records as they occur, instead of the native auditd log lines
Can my existing log pipeline ingest host audit data without a translation layer?
emits each event as JSON to syslog, a local file, Graylog2, or stdout, so downstream parsers consume the same structured format regardless of which output is chosen
Will heavy audit activity on a host cause events to back up and stall collection?
is built to avoid blocking on event delivery, and when the kernel produces events faster than they're read it surfaces this as a buffer-space error rather than stalling silently
Am I losing audit events under high load, and can I do anything about it?
reports the specific no-buffer-space condition when the system outpaces collection, pointing to whether the receive buffer size needs to be raised or the audit rules narrowed
What do I need to change in my detection rules to move from auditd's native format to this one?
replaces auditd as the source of the same underlying kernel audit data, so existing audit rules keep generating events, only the output shape changes from auditd's log format to JSON
Languages
Command line
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Values are placeholders taken from each option’s declared default. Nothing is executed here — the output shown is a recording of a run that already happened.
Score card
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Shipping velocity releases a month, last 12 months
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Documentation quality release-notes rubric, 0–100
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Breaking-change discipline how rarely a release breaks users, and notice given
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Maintenance risk quiet time against its own cadence, maintainers
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Innovation & surface new capabilities, API and MCP surface
- Community health
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Contributor trend distinct committers, this year against last
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Maintainer concentration bus factor now against a year ago
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Issue backlog trend issues closed per issue opened, 12 months
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Responsiveness median time to a maintainer’s first reply
Nine scores for go-audit, each built from the releases, notes and API history this site tracks — and, on Researcher and Business, where it stands among every measured tool in its category and how that has moved.
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Blank means never measured; nothing here is a filled-in zero.
Peer standings are included with Researcher and Business. See how this tool ranks against its competitors, using data we don't publish anywhere else.
See plans →Each score is 0–100 on a published rubric, derived from data this site already shows. A dimension we cannot measure says so — it is never scored 0 and never enters a rank.
How this is scored
- Shipping velocity — releases a month over the last 12 months, on a log scale where 16 a month scores 100. Needs 3 releases in the window.
- Documentation quality — the release-notes rubric published on the analytics page, unchanged.
- Breaking-change discipline — the share of releases carrying a breaking change (none scores 100, half or more scores 0). Only projects that label breaking changes are measured: a clean record cannot be told from an unlabelled one.
- Maintenance risk — quiet time measured against the tool's own release cadence (quiet longer than 90 days and three typical gaps scores 0), plus the number of active maintainers and whether contributors are growing, where known. Higher is lower risk.
- Innovation & surface — new capabilities in the feature ledger this year, API and MCP operations added, and the share of commits that are features: the mean of whichever we hold.
- Community health (open-source tools only) — each is a direction, not a size: contributors this year against last, the bus factor now against a year ago, and issues closed per issue opened, where steady scores 50, doubled 100 and halved 0; plus the median time to a maintainer's first reply (an hour scores about 100, a month or more 0). A commercial card has no repository and carries none of the four.
- Documented delivery (commercial tools) — when a vendor's documented new capabilities have slowed against its own baseline, that counts against the overall standing as heavily as two low dimensions. Steady delivery, or too little history to judge, leaves the standing alone; it is never a sixth score.
- Open-source tools are scored on repository signals; commercial tools on their published changelog. Ranks compare tools within one category and one profile and need at least five measured peers; the overall standing needs three ranked dimensions. Best-in-breed or consolidator is a shape, not a quality, and is never scored.
Release-note detail over time
See how much detail go-audit puts in its release notes, quarter by quarter, and compare it with tracked tools in the same category. This history uses up to ten retained, reviewed notes per tool; sparse or blank older quarters may reflect that limit.
Checking release-note history…
Releases
Nothing shipped since we started watching. Releases and docs updates land here as they happen.
Project health
Issue, contributor and maintainer activity in slackhq/go-audit, 2023-10 – 2026-09, as of 2026-09-25. Twelve-month figures first; the trend lines run the whole window.
- Contributors 2 +2 vs prior 12 months
- Maintainers 1 +1 joined · −0 left, last 12 months
- Bus factor 1 committers behind half the commits
- Community-filed not measured of issues opened, last 12 months
- Median time to close not measured issues closed, last 12 months
- Open backlog 15 of 48 issues ever filed
- Issues opened / month 0 · 0 communitymaintainers
- Open backlog 15
- Contributors / month 0
- Commits / month 0
- Stars 1,665
Counts from the project's public repository and git history; no individuals are identified. Maintainers are the committers covering 80% of the last year's commits. how we measure this
Libraries its release ships
What its latest release locks, checked against known advisories.None of its release's images build from a lockfile we can read.
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