CISA published a Logging Reference Architecture to help federal civilian agencies turn OMB M-26-14’s logging mandates into something they can actually run. The document lays out the architectural, operational, and governance choices behind logging for continuous monitoring, threat hunting, investigation, response, and forensics.
The point is not just storing more data. CISA says agencies need to decide what gets collected, how it is normalized, how long it stays searchable or retrievable, and whether it can be trusted in a real incident; logs that arrive late, lack detail, or cannot be searched quickly are functionally useless.
For federal teams, and for critical infrastructure operators that follow the same model, the lasting issue is whether logging is usable across agencies and across investigations. The architecture shifts logging from a capacity problem to a governance and design problem, and the exposure that remains after implementation is whatever telemetry still cannot support reconstruction or correlation when an incident hits.