Auditing is the recording of events that occur on source objects. Most events on Content Engine classes can be audited. If Content Engine is configured for auditing, Content Engine creates audit entries that are instances of one of the subclasses of the Event class.
Audit definitions represent information that describes how to audit an event. For example, you can configure an audit definition for a document class so that audit entries are automatically created whenever documents of that class are checked in.
Audit entries contain the following information, or properties:
Audit entries are stored in an audit log. The audit log exists as a table in the object store database. You can view the log, export it to XML for reporting and other purposes, and administer it. To do so you must run a query for the events you want and then perform actions against the result set of the query. See Query the audit log for more information.
You can use the export list function in Enterprise Manager to create tab- or comma-delimited XML files for reporting entries in the audit log. You can then generate reports from the XML files by using reporting tools from independent software vendors.
If you set the object state recording level, the system property ModifiedProperties returns the symbolic names of the properties modified by the audited event operation. This property belongs to the subclasses of the Object Change Event class that logs audit events involving a change of properties. You can get the entire list of subclasses that contain this property by examining the system properties belonging to the classes in Enterprise Manager under Other Classes > Events tree of subclasses, or from the Java™ API description of the ModifiedProperties property.
The performance impact of logging events is related to the following factors:
Auditing requires an extra database interaction; therefore, enabling auditing can have performance implications for your applications. If you increase the number and volume of audited events, monitor your system performance.
Each event object created by Content Engine auditing is stored as a row in the Event table in the object store database. For example, checking in a new version of a document uses one table row in the database. If that document class has all possible events audited, a single checkin can create up to three more entries in the database table. Therefore, to avoid running out of space, allocate database storage accordingly.
The following auditing activities use a large amount of database space:
Audit entries are stored in the object store database and are secured by the permissions placed on the default instance security list of their class.
You must be the object store administrator with Full Control access to configure auditing. Audit event entries have an ownership property, but the property is not set by default.
The operations available on audit entries are: delete, change the owner, and change the security.