Advanced auditing keeps a log of changes made to the database. The audit log can record when changes were made to a database and who made the changes. For example, you can see that user JaneB added commentary text to the Solvent Reduction measure at 14:16 on 2010 December 8th. The audit trail does not record the original and new values, so you cannot assemble a snapshot of the database at a given point in time. In this example, the log does not show that the measure commentary text was previously empty but now reads “Sales were off that quarter because of problems at the Western US warehouse complex”.

You can configure auditing to include the text of any commentary added to the database. In the preceding example, if you configured Metrics Management to record commentary text in the audit log, the log contains the full text that JaneB added to the Solvent Reduction Measure.

In most cases, Actuate recommends that you do not enable the options to include content of user data and commentary in log. Depending on how much data entry your organization performs, auditing to this level of detail may cause your audit log to grow dramatically. By default, Metrics Management does not enable this option when you create a new database.

Actuate recommends performing an audit archive on a regular basis to prevent the audit table from growing too large.

To enable or configure auditing, you must log in to the Metrics Management database using either the Administrator account or an account that has Act as an Administrator privileges. For information about how to enable and configure auditing, see Configuring a database.

Audit system events is enabled by Metrics Management itself. You cannot disable this option.