I just had this issue in production this morning.

This morning we had a failure in our audit backend(the file was rotated, but the -HUP signal did not happen for some reason).

vault log:

2017/06/19 05:41:59.431861 [ERROR] audit: backend failed to log response: backend=file/ error=write vault_audit.log: bad file descriptor
2017/06/19 05:41:59.431874 [ERROR] core: failed to audit response: request_path=auth/token/renew-self error=no audit backend succeeded in logging the response2017/06/19 05:42:26.046577 [ERROR] audit: backend failed to log request: backend=file/ error=write vault_audit.log: bad file descriptor
2017/06/19 05:42:26.046605 [ERROR] core: failed to audit request: path=auth/token/renew-self error=1 error occurred:

• no audit backend succeeded in logging the request

yet, the health checks were continuing to pass, despite error 500's on any read/write call to vault. This seems.. wrong somehow :)

Ideally, I'd love if vault on a bad FD would just try a re-open like if a HUP signal happened. Especially since audit is crucial to a valid operating vault system.

also, the /health check should probably at least WARN, if not outright FAIL, if it can't write the audit log for whatever reason.

@edjackson-wf Any chance you can tell me if you think https://github.com/hashicorp/vault/pull/3001/files meets your needs? I figured that an incrementing counter is probably the right way to go.

@jefferai Yes, I think that would work for me.

I suppose it might be worth considering the case where multiple audit backends are enabled and one fails. Is it worth distinguishing between audit failures that cause requests to fail and those that don't? It's not my use case, but it seems plausible.

@edjackson-wf We can add more specific metrics later if needed, but I'd argue that any time that counter is going up continually there's a bad situation just waiting to happen, regardless of which backend is currently experiencing the problem. At that point logs will tell the rest.

@jefferai Fair enough. Thanks a bunch for adding this.

No problem!