Auditing overview

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Applies To: Dynamics CRM 2013

Organizations often need to be in compliance with various regulations to ensure availability of customer interaction history, audit logs, access reports, and security incident tracking reports. Organizations may want to track changes in Microsoft Dynamics CRM data for security and analytical purpose.

 Microsoft Dynamics CRM supports an auditing capability where entity and attribute data changes within an organization can be recorded over time for use in analysis and reporting purposes. Auditing is supported on all custom and most customizable entities and attributes. Auditing is not supported on metadata changes, retrieve operations, export operations, or during authentication. For information on how to configure auditing, see Configure entities and attributes for auditing.

Supported for auditing

The following table lists what can be audited for Microsoft Dynamics CRM 2013 and Microsoft Dynamics CRM Online:

Audit of customizable entities

Audit of custom entities

Configure entities for audit

Configure attributes for audit

Privilege-based audit trail viewing

Privilege-based audit summary viewing

Audit log deletion for a partitioned SQL database

Audit log deletion for a non-partitioned SQL database

Microsoft Dynamics CRM SDK programming support

Audit of record create, update, and delete operations

Audit of relationships (1:N, N:N)

Audit of audit events

Audit of user access

Adherence to regulatory standards

Not supported for auditing

The following table lists what cannot be audited for Microsoft Dynamics CRM 2013 and Microsoft Dynamics CRM Online:

Audit of read operations

Audit of metadata changes

Audit of text blobs, notes, and attachments

Key concepts

The following bullets identify some key auditing concepts:

  • You can enable or disable auditing at the organization, entity, and attribute levels. If auditing is not enabled at the organization level, auditing of entities and attributes, even if it is enabled, does not occur. By default, auditing is enabled on all auditable entity attributes, but is disabled at the entity and organization level.

  • For Microsoft Dynamics CRM servers that use Microsoft SQL Server Enterprise editions, auditing data is recorded over time (quarterly) in partitions. A partition is called an audit log in the Microsoft Dynamics CRM Web application. Partitions are not supported, and therefore, not used, on a Microsoft Dynamics CRM 2011 server that is running Microsoft SQL Server Standard edition.

  • The ability to retrieve and display the audit history is restricted to users who have certain security privileges: View Audit History, and View Audit Summary. There are also privileges specific to partitions: View Audit Partitions, and Delete Audit Partitions. See the specific message request documentation for information about the required privileges for each message.

  • Audited data changes are stored in records of the audit entity.

Data that can be audited

The following list identifies the data and operations that can be audited:

  • Create, update, and delete operations on records.

  • Changes to the shared privileges of a record.

  • N:N association or disassociation of records.

  • Changes to security roles.

  • Audit changes at the entity, attribute, and organization level. For example, enabling audit on an entity.

  • Deletion of audit logs.

  • When (date/time) a user accesses Microsoft Dynamics CRM data, for how long, and from what client.

Enabling or disabling of field level security by setting the IsSecured attribute cannot be audited.

See Also

Manage your data
Audit entity data changes
Configure entities and attributes for auditing
Audit entity messages and methods
Audit (auditing) entity privileges
Privileges not associated with an entity
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