Business Objects Enterprise includes auditing functionality that allows you to verify if reports and user management are appropriate, are efficient,

and are adequately controlled to ensure valid, reliable, timely, and secure input, processing, and output at all levels of a system’s activity.

What’s in it for me?

• A controlled environment in which it’s clear which users and user groups use objects and reports.
• Root cause analysis to easily relate the disruption of a service to changes and users.
• Which reports are used and which reports are ‘dead’.
• It enables efficient license usage. Why pay for want you do not use?

The audit should answer the following questions:

1. Who is using your reporting solution?
2. Which groups use your reporting solution the most?
3. Which objects they are accessing?
4. Which reports are they using?
5. How many user licenses are we using at any given time?

You can audit the actions of individual users of Business Objects Enterprise as they log in and out of the system, access data, or create file-based events. You can also monitor system actions like the success or failure of scheduled objects. For each action, Business Objects Enterprise records the time of the action, the name and user group of the user who initiated the action, the server where it was performed, and a variety of other parameters available in the documentation with Business Objects.

The auditable actions I like the most are:

• Track when Objects are created, deleted of modified;
• Track when reports are opened, saved, refreshed, created, modified and deleted;
• Job monitoring and failure;
• Changes and history in login behaviour of users and groups;
• Monitoring of license usage.

A post last year on the Chennai Bi blog gives some useful guidelines on how to implement auditing: http://chennaibi.wordpress.com/2009/04/07/business-objects-auditing-in-xir3/

Martijn