Dynamics CRM 2011 Auditing
Microsoft has provided out-of-box auditing functionality that far exceeds what was manually available in Dynamics CRM 4.0. In CRM 4.0, audit logs had to be created manually with custom entities and subsequent mappings. There were also third party tools available to address this need, but they were often cumbersome to use and expensive.
Setup
In order to enable auditing, this must be activated at the organization level. To do this:
1. Navigate to System > System > Auditing.
2. Select Global Audit Settings and select where auditing will take place.
Once auditing is enabled at the organization level, each entity within the application area is now audit enabled. From this area, toggling audit on or off can be done depending on the specific needs of the organization. To view this setup or make changes, follow these steps:
1. Navigate to System > System > Auditing.
2. Select Entity and Field Audit Settings.
3. Select and open the entity to manage auditing functionality.
4. Ensure that Auditing in Data Services is checked.
5. Select the Fields component within the entity.
6. Select the field(s) to be audited
Working with Auditing
Now that the field has been enabled for auditing, if there is a change to this field, the data will be written to the audit history table for that entity. In this example, if someone changes the credit limit for a particular account, it will be recorded like the below example:
The information can also be viewed directly from the Auditing entity to view all changes to the entities and fields.
1. Navigate to Settings > System.
2. Select Audit Summary View (which is customizable like any other view within an entity).
Notes
- When turning auditing on for an entity, all fields are automatically set to be audited. This can affect performance on save of a record as each field will need to be read and interpreted then saved to the database. Care should be taken when determining which fields should be audited.
- Set up auditing as early as possible to reduce the lag time between transactions.
- If auditing is stopped at any level, and users are continuing to update records, those updates will not get audited.
- CRM 2011 will log all of the audits, so turn off those entities/fields that may not be used in order to keep the log file size down.
- No Advanced Find capabilities exist on Audit entity
- No Workflow capabilities exist on the Audit entity
Logging
Once auditing is enabled, a log file is automatically created. A couple of things to note about this:
- The audit log maintenance file is created by Microsoft and is not configurable.
- The log is auto created on a quarterly basis of the calendar year.
- This area needs monitoring as depending on the number of elements being audited, these log files will grow.
- Only previous versions of the logs can be deleted. Once a log file is deleted, the audit history for the related record in that time period is no longer available.
To view the log navigate to Settings > System > Audit Log Management
