Security Guide for Siebel eBusiness Applications > Physical Deployment and Auditing >

Auditing for Data Continuity

To maintain data continuity and monitor activity on a Siebel site, Siebel applications can maintain an audit trail of information that indicates when business component fields have been changed, who made the change, and what has been changed.

Audit Trail is a configurable feature that creates a history of the changes that have been made to various types of information in various Siebel applications. An audit trail is a record showing who accessed an item, which operation was performed, when it was performed, and how the value was changed. Therefore, it is useful for maintaining security, examining the history of a particular record, and documenting modifications for future analysis and record keeping. Audit Trail logs information without requiring any interaction with or input from users.

By using Audit Trail, users can track which employee modified a certain field and what data has been changed. A call center user can track the status change of a service request or calculate the time it takes to solve it. For example, a user can activate the Audit Trail functionality on a status field in the Service Requests screen. An audit trail record is created for each status change, along with a time stamp and the ID of the user who made the change.

A more advanced use of Audit Trail involves a user who reconstructs records that existed at a certain point in time by doing complex queries. Companies can use Audit Trail to track data history in compliance with government directives, to analyze performance, and to improve service quality. Companies that use Audit Trail to track every change to every record to comply with government regulations must consider the performance ramifications of such massive auditing.

Audit Trail is applicable for every Siebel Web deployment and configuration option, including synchronization with Mobile Web Clients and replication to or from regional databases supported by Siebel Replication Manager. Audit Trail records not only successfully committed transactions, but also transactions that did not get synchronized to the server because of conflicts.

For information on configuring and using Audit Trail, see Applications Administration Guide.