# Ecommerce Security Monitoring and Audit Logs

> Monitor important security events and preserve protected audit records for investigation and accountability.

- Type: Merchant guide
- Level: Intermediate
- Reading time: About 4 minutes
- Audience: Written for store owners, builders, and designers refining high-performance ecommerce stores.
- Last updated: 2026-11-04
- Canonical page: https://academy.getzenbasket.com/merchant-questions/ecommerce-security-monitoring-and-audit-logs/
- Part of: [Merchant Questions](https://academy.getzenbasket.com/merchant-questions/) on ZenBasket Academy

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## What you need to know

### What ecommerce security events should be monitored?

Monitor admin and customer authentication, MFA and recovery, privilege changes, exports, app installations, secret use, security settings, payment abuse and unusual data access.

### What security events should trigger alerts?

Alert on events requiring timely action: privileged-account takeover signals, exposed credentials, mass exports, security controls disabled, unusual permission grants and sustained payment or login attacks.

### Should failed login attempts be monitored?

Yes. Monitor volume, target accounts, sources, and outcomes while avoiding logs that expose passwords. Use thresholds and patterns rather than alerting on every typo.

### Should permission changes be monitored?

Yes. Record and alert on privileged or unusual grants, role changes and access removals, especially changes made by newly privileged or unexpected accounts.

### Should customer-data exports be logged?

Yes. Log actor, time, dataset, scope, purpose or ticket and result. Protect the log and exported file and avoid duplicating the customer data inside the log.

### Should refund activity be audit logged?

Yes. Refund logs support fraud review, reconciliation, and accountability. Connect actor, order, amount, reason, approval and result.

### How can audit logs help investigate security incidents?

Audit logs reconstruct who changed access, exported data or altered an order and when. Correlation IDs can connect actions across services during an investigation.

### Who should have access to security logs?

Limit security-log access to authorized security, operations and audit roles with a defined need. Separate log administration from ordinary store administration where practical.

### A quick store check

Select one sensitive admin change and reconstruct actor, time, target, result and related alert from protected logs.

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## Frequently asked questions

### Should security logs be kept forever?

No. Set a risk, investigation and legal purpose, protect them and delete them under a defined schedule.

### Can an administrator delete their own audit record?

Ordinary administrators should not be able to rewrite evidence of their sensitive actions.

## Related articles

- **Ecommerce Payment Security and PCI DSS**
- **Ecommerce Security Incident Response**