Audit Trail

Use audit trail to identify Product Hub business objects that you want to track for data changes and object definition changes.

You can review the change history online. You can also export it into spreadsheet and review the change history offline. In order to audit changes, you must define an audit policy.

The Manage Audit Policy task lists all the Product Hub business objects and their attributes that are available for audit. You can access this task from the following in the Setup and Maintenance work area:

Offering: Product Management
Functional Area: Audit Trail
Task: Manage Audit Policies

You can define your audit policy by selecting the objects and the attributes. For auditing descriptive flexfields, select the business object and click Create. Then, select the Flexfields (Additional Attributes) check box from the Audited Attributes column. You can now select all the additional attributes for audit purposes.

When you change the Product Hub business objects listed in the audit policy, the application logs who (user ID) changed what (add, or update, or delete) and when (date and time). The changes are recorded only for the objects and attributes that are members of the audit policy.

These data changes are tracked and logged for:

Data inserts
Data updates
Data deletions

Additionally, the user activities on attachments such as Attachment Check-In, Attachment Checkout, Attachment Cancel Checkout, and Attachment Download are tracked and logged for the following list of attachment business objects if the attachments type is Text, File, or Repository File/Folder:

Item Attachments
Item Revision Attachments
Change Object Attachments
Structure Attachments
Catalog Attachments
Category Attachments

Audit Trail Versus New Item Request and Changes Orders

Audit trail is not the same functionality as the New Item Request or Change Order functionality. New item requests and change orders are approval-oriented changes. Audit trail automatically logs data change events that were triggered by any functionality, including new item requests and change orders.

Search Parameter and Result

This table lists the search parameters that are used in the audit and the outcome of their selection in the detailed report.

Search Parameter	Result of Selection
Business Object Type	Narrows the search results to that specific business object within the selected product.
Include Child Objects	Displays entire child objects that were listed in the business object when the audit was set up. Note: This displays the objects at the immediate parent-child level only. To view the children at subsequent levels, select the child object as the business object type and search again.
Show Attribute Details	Displays the name of each attribute you have created, updated, or deleted, and the corresponding old and replaced values. Enables the attribute list so that you can select a specific attribute and view its change record. Enables the Show Extended Object Identifier Columns check box to display.
Show additional object identifier columns	Displays the instances (contexts) in which the business object was used. The context values identify the objects and the transactions in which they were used. Each context is unique and assigns a unique description to the business object. For example, if an item is made purchasable in a child organization, then the child organization is listed as the context.

Access Audit Reports

To access the audit reports and view the tracked changes, click Navigator > Audit Reports.

For example, watch the following video that shows the audit information about attachment activities for an item.