Enabling auditing of user and system actions

To audit an action in Crystal Enterprise you must first determine which Crystal Enterprise server controls the action. Then you must enable auditing on the server from the Servers management area of the Crystal Management Console (CMC).

If you have multiple Crystal Enterprise servers of a given type, be sure to enable identical audit actions on every server. Doing so ensures that you collect information on all user or system actions in your Crystal Enterprise system. For example, if you are interested in the total number of concurrent user logons, enable auditing of concurrent user logons on each of your Crystal Management Servers. If you enable auditing on only one Crystal Management Server, you will only collect audit information about actions that occur on that server.

In some special cases you may wish to enable auditing on only one server of a given type. For example, if you are interested in the success or failure of only one kind of scheduled report and you have configured your system so that these reports are processed on one particular Report Job Server, it is not necessary to enable auditing on every Report Job Server in your system. You only need to enable auditing on the Report Job Server where the reports are processed.

Note:    You must configure the auditing database before you can collect data on audit actions. See Configuring the auditing database for instructions.

To enable audit actions

1. Go to the Servers management area of the CMC.
2. Click the server that controls the action that you wish to audit.

   (See the Reference list of auditable actions to find the correct server.) The server management area for the server opens.

3. Click the Auditing tab.

   

4. Select the Auditing is enabled check box.
5. Select the audit actions that you wish to record.
6. Ensure that your audit log file is located on a hard drive that has sufficient space to store the log files. (See Optimizing system performance while auditing for information on adjusting the size of log files.)
7. Click Update.

Tip:    

• To audit every failure of a scheduled report or a scheduled program, enable auditing of "A job has failed to run" on the Job Server, and "Communication with a running instance is lost" on the Crystal Management Server.
• Auditing is enabled independently on each server. If you want to audit all actions of a given type, enable identical audit actions on every server that supports those actions. Otherwise your audit record will be incomplete. For example, if you want to track the total number of concurrent logons to your Crystal Enterprise system, you must enable logging of concurrent logons on every Crystal Management Server in your system.

Related topics

• Which actions can I audit?
• Configuring the auditing database
• Reporting on audit results