BusinessObjects Auditing - Considerations & Enabling

[former_member182521]

Dear Folks,

This is the continuation of my previous blog on BusinessObjects Audit Universe and reports deployment here SAP BusinessObjects 4.0 Auditor Configuration & Deployment End to End and is supposed to be successor of this blog. I would like to talk about Audit considerations, how it works and the process of enabling auditing in BusinessObjects.

As you all aware auditing enables us to have a detailed historical view of user and object interaction and the system usage over a period of time. Based on the audit reports we can identify usage pattern of the business community such as peak usage, unused reports and inactive users. Further this will help us to fine tune environment for effective utilization.

Auditing considerations

While implementing Auditing requirements we should be in a position to consider the below factors.

• By implementing System auditing we are imposing additional load to the system which need to be considered during initial sizing exercises.
• We should precisely identify the required system metrics without including redundant information from audit tables as auditing unnecessary metrics will again increase system load.

How auditing works in BusinessObjects

Audit information will be collected from the servers which are enabled for their auditable actions. The collected information will be stored in the form of audit log files in the BusinessObjects server locally. As per the polling interval configured, the CMS would be collecting this log details and adds them in to audit database to make it ready for reporting. Thus audit information will be always historical. If you want to extract the real-time information of the repository CMS database will be the only source of truth.

Enabling/Disabling trace logs

To enable and disable trace logs at various levels refer the blog here Configuring trace Logs in BusinessObjects 4.0

Enabling System auditing

For audit enablement we should always configure a database to hold the set of audit tables as a first step. Subsequently we should identify list of actions to be captured and enable them as auditable. CMC is the place where you need to do all these stuff.

Deployment of Audit Universe and reports

You can refer the blog here for as-is samples of Audit universe and reports and their deployment. SAP BusinessObjects 4.0 Auditor Configuration & Deployment End to End. If required you can even customize and develop your own set of reports on top of this.

Hope the blog is informative and helpful. Thanks for reading.