When people hear auditing and monitoring, they can easily assume they refer to the same thing. After all, both involve keeping an eye on IT systems, right? While both terms have multiple meanings, without qualifiers, they relate to functions that serve different purposes and leverage unrelated tools and technologies. Understanding these differences is fundamental to successful operations and team communication. It is relevant to IT teams, security professionals, and business leaders. Let’s break it down.
What is Auditing?
In IT, Auditing is a function typically associated with security and regulatory compliance. It is also known as Activity Monitoring and focuses on tracking what users and administrators do inside IT systems. That is particularly relevant to systems that handle sensitive information.
What Does Auditing Involve?
Auditing aims to monitor system activity for security and compliance purposes. Key objectives include:
- Meeting regulatory compliance requirements
- Detecting unauthorized access or insider threats
- Alerting security teams of suspicious activity
- Identifying poor security practices
- Conducting forensic investigations (both proactive and reactive)
Auditing focuses on systems that handle sensitive data, such as databases and critical applications.
A Security Operations Center (SOC) filled with large screens, dashboards, and blinking lights is an example of how organizations can identify and respond to security events. SOC operators constantly review security-related events to keep the organization protected.
SOC teams use SIEM systems that receive security-related events over the SYSLOG protocol. Auditing can feed events to security operations like SOC by sending SYSLOG messages to the SIEM.
Another meaning of IT Auditing
IT Auditing can also refer to an audit conducted by an internal or external auditor. In an IT audit, an auditor examines the security controls used to protect the IT systems. An audit will inspect the scope, the plan, and the implementation of security controls. Passing an IT audit is an essential step in regulatory compliance.
What is Monitoring?
At its core, monitoring means observing and checking the progress or quality of something. In IT, monitoring typically refers to the work done by Operations teams. The goal is simple: ensure all IT systems are functioning well.
Unlike IT auditing, which covers only systems with sensitive information, monitoring covers all infrastructure components, from databases and applications to network switches, routers, firewalls, and more.
What Does Monitoring Involve?
Monitoring tracks the overall health and performance of the IT infrastructure. That includes:
- Detecting if computers, servers, or services are down
- Ensuring network connectivity
- Identifying performance problems, such as slow applications
- Monitoring resource usage to detect low disk space, out-of-memory, loaded CPUs, etc.
Generally, operations teams monitor systems 24/7 using network monitoring tools that rely on SNMP. If something goes wrong, they take corrective action or escalate the issue to the relevant manager or on-call domain expert.
A Network Operations Center (NOC) filled with large screens, dashboards, and blinking lights is an example of how organizations can monitor. NOC operators keep everything running smoothly by constantly monitoring the infrastructure for system failures and performance issues.
Other Meanings for Monitoring
Activity Monitoring is another term for auditing. For example, Database Auditing is also known as Database Activity Monitoring (DAM).
Monitoring can also refer to monitoring of security events. That is sometimes called Security Monitoring, SIM (Security Information Monitoring), or SEM (Security Event Monitoring). It is the analysis performed on various security events, including ones originating from auditing. It is, essentially, the work done by SOC teams using an SIEM (Security Information Event Management).
Monitoring can also refer to management supervision, and the term Compliance Monitoring refers to management supervision of security and compliance operations. The objective is to avoid non-compliance by continuously assessing regulatory compliance.
Key Differences
| Monitoring | Auditing or Activity Monitoring | Security Monitoring (SIM, SEM, SIEM) | |
|---|---|---|---|
| Purpose | Ensure systems are up and performing | Track user activity for security and compliance | Analyze security events for security and compliance |
| Which Systems? | The entire IT infrastructure (networks, servers, applications, etc.) | Specific systems handling sensitive information (databases, critical applications) | Most of the IT infrastructure (networks, servers, databases, etc.) |
| Data Type | Uptime, performance information, resource utilization | User activity data (logins, data access) | Security events (errors, warnings, and specific accesses) |
| Data Volume | Low to moderate (thousands to millions of metrics per hour overall across all systems) | High (millions to tens of millions of events per hour per audited system) | Low to moderate (thousands to millions of metrics per hour overall across all systems) |
| Responsibility | Operations team (e.g., NOC) | Security team (e.g., SOC) | Security team (e.g., SOC) |
Why is There So Much Confusion?
The first reason for confusion is that both Auditing and Monitoring can refer to several different things. You usually need to determine the correct meaning based on context.
There is also a lot of overlap in terminology, as some security professionals refer to auditing as Activity Monitoring. Auditing also generates security events later analyzed by security monitoring and is, therefore, a precursor to it.
To make things more confusing, modern IT teams can combine operations and security functions in SecOps, DevSecOps, and OpSec, blurring the lines between monitoring and auditing.
Another point of confusion is the similarity between a Network Operations Center (NOC) and a Security Operations Center (SOC). While both operate around the clock and monitor systems, the NOC focuses on availability, while the SOC focuses on security.
Bottom Line
If you are an IT operations professional, your primary focus is monitoring – ensuring everything stays up and running. If you are in security, you are more concerned with auditing – tracking activity to prevent breaches and maintain compliance.
Both are critical to a well-functioning IT environment but serve distinct roles. Proper differentiation can help businesses implement the right strategies to ensure security and uptime.
