Audit Trails module

EMu provides auditing of all user and administration activity. The list of operations to audit is configurable and ranges from record operations such as inserting, editing, deleting, querying and viewing to system activities such as logins, database closures and maintenance. All auditing information includes the date, time, username, operation type, record type and key number for all database actions.

The audit trail functionality maintains a complete history of changes to a record.

An audit trail record is generated for all operations registered for monitoring. There are five levels for which audit records may be generated:

  • change (insertions, updates, deletions)
  • search (queries)
  • display (viewed, sorted, reported)
  • login (first access of a module in current session)
  • all (all database operations)

Each of these may be set on a per module basis, which means that it is possible to monitor all changes to records in the Parties module, for instance, while Multimedia records may be audited for changes, searches and records viewed.

Note: Every EMu module contains an Audit tab that lists all audit trail records for the current record. Each record details the operation performed, who performed it and the date on which it was performed. From this tab it is also possible to view the complete audit trail record in the Audit Trails module.

Reports are provided that allow Administrators to produce audit listings detailing changes made on a per user basis, within specified time constraints.

Audit records are:

  • Read-only (even to System Administrators), ensuring that they are not tampered with.
  • Generated at the database level to ensure non-repudiation of the data they contain.
  • Only accessible to appropriately privileged personnel.

Record Recall

Record Recall was introduced with EMu 4.0.01. Record Recall is a natural extension to the audit trail functionality as it enables suitably authorised users to update a record with data from an earlier version of the record. Such functionality is useful for instance where a user may have:

  • Changed and saved a record only to want the record back as it was before saving it.
  • Performed a global replace only to find the changes were not exactly what was required.

It is important to understand that although Record Recall enables a record to be returned to an earlier state this is not in fact undoing changes to the record: a complete linear history of changes is always maintained and using the Record Recall function to change a record is itself an amendment that is added to the record's audit trail.

Record Recall allows a single record to be recalled to the data it contained in a previous version and also provides a batch mode for a group of (one or more) records to be recalled to their state at a given date and time.

The audit facility also provides an archiver that allows all audit records to be saved in a file on a daily basis for archival purposes or for use as raw data to load into another system.

Tip: Details about configuring the audit facilities can be found in Auditing.