NEIL PARKHURST

As I prepare for my MB2-716 exam I’m producing a series of blog posts that collectively should help others revising for the MB2-716 Certification. (Microsoft Dynamics 365 customization and Configuration.) This time I will look at how to configure auditing.

Auditing is another key area to review as you prepare for the Dynamics 365 Customization and Configuration exam. You will find the auditing option in the settings area of Dynamics 365.

Global Audit Settings

We have an option to define global audit settings for the organization and another option to define entity / field settings. Meaning auditing can be defined at a system / organization level, entity level and field level. (Remember system, entity, field level auditing!)

At a system / global level you can enable auditing and define which areas to audit. You can also log when user log in / out of CRM.

Notice that the global audit settings option accesses the “System Settings” tab dialog that we previously saw when reviewing other system settings.

Auditing can be easily enabled for “common entities”, “Sales Entities”, “Marketing Entities” and “Customer Service Entities”. Hovering the mouse over the name of these entity groups will list the items that will be enabled if this option is selected.

Also notice that we have a hyper link that will show the status of all entities. Clicking this link will actually open your default solution. Alternatively you can click on the “Entity and Field Audit Settings” option we saw on the auditing menu.

Entity and Field Audit Settings

Selecting the Entity and Field Audit Settings option will actually open the default solution. Here you will see a column called audit status which will denote which entities are enabled for auditing. Notice that I have created a custom entity and enabled that for auditing. As auditing can pretty much be applied to any system or custom entity.

I that auditing can “pretty much” be defined on any system or custom entity as some exceptions exist. As shown below. Auditing is not applicable on product relationship, sync error, article template. Product association, feedback, activity or category entities.

FYI:
The activity entity can’t be audited but individual activity types such as phone call, appointment (etc) can be.

Notes:

• Auditing is not supported for read operations
• Auditing is not supported for metadata changes
• Auditing is not supported for text blobs, notes and attachments.

To enable any system or custom entity for auditing you can set the “auditing” option that you will find on the entity properties screen as you create / amend entities.

Additionally we can define which fields within the entity will trigger auditing. You can see below that I have highlighted the audit status on the fields within the account entity.

Audit Summary View

The audit settings also allow you to view and manage the audit logs. Below you can see the audit summary view that allows me to see when auditing has been enabled at an entity level. Plus, once enabled, any updates will start to show in the audit view.

Opening the update event will show us exactly what field(s) have been changed.

You may need to be aware that we can filter the audit summary view to help focus on particular audit records. But we cannot use advanced find to create bespoke system or personal views.

Audit Log Management

My test audit logs are very small but I’m sure you can appreciate that audit logs could quickly grow in size. You will therefore eventually want to recover database space by deleting audit logs.

This is a simple process of selecting a log and using the delete logs option to remove the log. Except you must always select the oldest log! To delete multiple logs you must keep deleting the oldest log until you have deleted enough logs.

Hopefully I have given you a good overview of auditing, including how to enable it and manage your audit logs etc. As part of your revision for MB2-716 you should try enabling auditing on various entities / fields. (Hands on experience is always the best!)