One day while checking things for clients, I happened across a fun little error message – “SQL Server Audit failed to create the audit file“. It just so happens that the audit had been working and then suddenly stopped and started flooding the error logs with this message.

Why would it suddenly stop working? Well, it says in the error that the disk might be full or that there may be a permissions issue. So, at least there are some possibilities provided by the message. Granted – neither of these options is very settling for a DBA.

FAILED

While reading the first occurrence of this error message, you notice that the log is bombarded with 20 more messages of the same nature. Before you can even scroll to catch up with the error messages, another 30 have appeared. It looks like the server is starting to get busier with the business users starting to run through their daily routines. You need a fix and you need it quick. You copy and paste the error to another screen for reference and then close the log to remove that distraction. Here is a copy of that error message.

SQL Server Audit failed to create the audit file ‘C:\Database\XE\DBA_Server_Audit_906B13C3-8F3F-4CFC-A391-20C5F7CAD698.sqlaudit’. Make sure that the disk is not full and that the SQL Server service account has the required permissions to create and write to the file.

Let’s try the suggestions from the error message starting with security. The SQL Server Service account needs to have permissions to the directory where the audit is being stored. Looking in that directory, you can see that the audit was obviously successful at one point because there are audit files in the directory. In addition, the audit just barely stopped working and you are certain nothing has changed.

Regardless of that, you proceed to investigate the permissions settings on the directory. Looking at the directory permissions, you are able to fully confirm that the service account does indeed have adequate permissions to the folder.

So we can rule out the permissions having changed as being a viable contender for causing this problem. As you start to proceed to investigate the next option, you start to worry that users are being prevented from doing their jobs because of the flood of errors. For sanity sake, you run a few quick checks to verify things look normal on the server from an activity standpoint. You also check your ticket queues and find there is nothing alarming in there.

Phwew!

Still Trying

After checking the ticket queues and server activity, you bounce right back to your next check point – disk space. This is an easier check than the permissions. You have no mount points and you can verify the disk space with a quick glance in windows explorer. You look in windows explorer and can see that your C drive where the audits are being stored has 50% free space (or roughly 200GB).

Well, that is obviously not the problem either. You know the audit was working as recently as 30 minutes before you started troubleshooting and the errors did not start until almost immediately before you started checking the problem. What could it be? Afterall, you have 35 audit files in the audit folder for the trace. Then, suddenly, it hits you. There are 35 files. The trace was configured for 35 files with no rollover.

In this case, the easy fix is to move a bunch of files to an archive folder. As soon as that is done, a new message will appear in the error logs:

Message
Audit: Server Audit: 65536, State changed from: TARGET_CREATION_FAILED to: STARTED

Now to go change the audit process to make it a little more robust.

When dealing with SQL Audit, max_files is an important setting. Here is what msdn has to say about the setting.

MAX_FILES =integer

Specifies the maximum number of audit files that can be created. Does not rollover to the first file when the limit is reached. When the MAX_FILES limit is reached, any action that causes additional audit events to be generated will fail with an error.

This article is just one of several audit related articles on this blog. You can read more about some of the different ways to audit along with different perspectives from this link.

Wrap

Auditing is a necessity but it doesn’t need to be alarming or scary. Sometimes, we can become a little bit alarmed when an error occurs. We just need to keep our cool and trust our skills and abilities to troubleshoot in the event an audit fails. This article will hopefully show some of that process and help to provide a cool demeanor.