Introduction
As of March, 2021, the Audit Trail functionality will be enhanced in order to offer a completely revamped way to manage audit logs. The new Audit Trail functionality has been rebuilt as a standalone feature (that you can reach via the Settings section of the Admin Menu) outside of the context of a report and of an app (the current Audit Trail is found in the Reports menu and is a platform app). This enhanced functionality improves the data extraction performance, especially for clients with large databases. The user interface of the area (the new Audit Trail menu) has been redesigned in line with the new platform layout, and a handful of important changes between the current and the new Audit Trail have been made. This article lists the changes introduced by this feature enhancement and lists the APIs that have been developed for this new feature.Audit Trail Management and Edits
In the current Audit Trail functionality, when you as a Superadmin create an Audit Trail report, the filtering mechanism (on the first page you filter by users, on the second page by courses, on the third page by event dates, event categories and fields) is complex and divided into several pages of the configuration process. With the new Audit Trail functionality, you only need to set the filters in the corresponding panel, press Apply Filters, and your audit log table will automatically refresh using the applied filters. The result of your research is immediately available to you, without the need of going through several configuration steps. The same happens when you want to edit one or more filters and see the results: in the current Audit Trail functionality, you need to identify your report from the table listing all of the custom reports created in the platform (at the bottom of the Reports menu), click the ellipsis icon and select the Edit option, and then go through all of the steps of the configuration to change the filter as desired. With the new Audit Trail functionality, you only need to set a different filter in the Filters panel, press Apply Filters, and the table on the page will automatically refresh using the new filters.Advanced Filters Capabilities
With the new Audit Trail functionality, searching for specific records becomes simpler and more intuitive. As a consequence, you will notice a notable increase in performance. Thanks to the advanced filters available in the new functionality, you can also search by target, and not only by the person or object performing the action, improving and simplifying the user experience. For example, with the current Audit Trail functionality, if you know that the training material ABC has been deleted and you want to include this action in your audit log, you can only search by the user who performed the action, the course involved or the date when the event happened. It can be a long and complicated search if you only remember the name of the training material, but you don’t know other info. With the new functionality, you can easily search for the training material name, ABC, via the Target advanced filter.Deprecation of Audit Trail Report Schedules
In the current Audit Trail functionality, once you have configured your Audit Trail report, you can decide to schedule it, by choosing how often (every hour, day, week…) the audit trail is sent to the email addresses you add in the corresponding field of the configuration window. However, this capability is scarcely used, and for this reason the schedule capability is no longer available in the new functionality.Access to Audit Trail
In the current Audit Trail functionality, at the bottom of the Reports page, all of the reports created within the menu (including the audit trails, which are built using the reports menu) are listed. From there, you can reach the audit logs you created and schedule, edit or delete them. As already explained in the introductory section of this guide, the new Audit Trail functionality has been rebuilt as a standalone feature and it is no longer a report, but a log of all the actions performed in the platform in a given time frame and corresponding to the filters you set. For this reason, the Audit Trail menu does not show the list of the audit logs created, but it shows a table listing all of the actions performed in the system, filtered using the filters panel on the left side of the page. In the next months, we will add additional filtering capabilities, presets, that will enable you to save different configurations of filters and to quickly apply them to filter the actions shown in your audit trail.Important Notes for Initial Transition
Once the new Audit Trail functionality is released, you can keep track of administrative actions performed in the platform by using the Audit Trail menu (that you reach via the Settings section of the Admin Menu), benefiting from the new experience and features available in the new menu. The current Audit Trail feature is still available on your platform in the Reports menu for some months and you can use both of these two menus, but we highly suggest trying out the new and improved Audit Trail feature. You can start using the new Audit Trail functionality as soon as it is available on your platform, no configuration nor activation is needed on your side! After the new functionality is released in March, 2021, the old Audit Trail feature won’t be removed from the old Reports menu, but it is still (and will be for some months) in your platform for a number of reasons:- With the new Audit Trail functionality, you are able to track only the events that took place from the time when the new functionality is available on your platform, but you are not be able to track the events which occurred before the release of the new Audit Trail.
- You can continue to use the old Audit Trail report when you need to search for events which took place before the availability of the new functionality. Then, even when the old functionality is no longer available (don’t worry, it will not happen in the first half of 2021), we will still give you the possibility to have access to your old events. Unfortunately, for technical reasons, we can't transfer events from the old Audit Trail to the new one. So, before the deprecation of the old Audit Trail functionality, we will release a feature enabling you to search and extract in the old archive.
- You will still use the old Audit Trail when you need to include in your audit log those events that are not yet available into the new Audit Trail functionality. In fact, some of the events are not yet selectable in the new functionality, but we are working to make available all of them, so that you’ll find all of the events in the new Audit Trail functionality in a couple of months.
New APIs
The New APIs table lists the APIs available for the new Audit Trail functionality. These APIs will be fully operational starting from March, 2021.| API Description | API Verb | API URL |
|---|---|---|
| Creates a new extraction request of audit trails logs | POST | /audittrail/v1/audittrail |
| Retrieves the logs generated from a specific extraction request | GET | /audittrail/v1/audittrail/{query_execution_id} |
| Retrieves all the event types supported by the audit trail service | GET | /audittrail/v1/audittrail/event-types |
| Retrieves a CSV file of the requested extraction | GET | /audittrail/v1/audittrail/{query_execution_id}/download |
Creates a new extraction request of audit trails logs
POST /audittrail/v1/audittrail @parameter adminFilters [object, optional] Filter by one or more specific columns@item operatedById [object, optional] Filter by actor_id column
@item option [string, required] The type of condition to apply to the query
@item value [string, required] The value of the field
@item operatedBy [object, optional] Filter by actor column
@item option [string, required] The type of condition to apply to the query
@item value [string, required] The value of the field
@item targetId [object, optional] Filter by target_id column
@item option [string, required] The type of condition to apply to the query
@item value [string, required] The value of the field
@item target [object, optional] Filter by target column
@item option [string, required] The type of condition to apply to the query
@item value [string, required] The value of the field
@item ip [object, optional] Filter by ip column
@item option [string, required] The type of condition to apply to the query
@item value [string, required] The value of the field
@parameter eventType [array(string), optional] List of event names @parameter timeframe [object, optional]@item from [string, required] Event start date in UTC format
@item to[string, required] Event end date in UTC format