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Audit Monitor is a feature of NetVisn which you will not find in any other product.
Cognos Administrators who have used it say it is not only very cool but also very useful.
This feature monitors any changes to the Cognos content store in real time, checking for objects being added, deleted or modified.
Modified objects are compared to their previous state resulting in a detailed report of all property value changes including security.
The users making these changes are also captured to provide a complete audit trail for your content store.
Let's take a look at the NetVisn audit monitor in action.
In NetVisn I'll click the Audit Console tab.
On this page, filter and output options are available to manage the query which we'll look at in detail a bit later.
I'll just run a simple query to look at content store changes which have occurred today.
Here you can see the data captured by the Audit Monitor, including who made the change, the object type and location,
the type of change, and the exact properties which changed along with before and after values.
Next I'll go over to Cognos in the other browser tab and make a service setting change.
In Cognos Administration I'll drill down on the dispatcher and edit the Batch Report Service settings,
changing the logging level to Basic and non-peak processes to 3.
After saving I'll rerun the audit query in NetVisn.
Here you can see that both modified properties have been captured.
This level of auditing occurs on all objects in the content store.
While I'm in Cognos Administrator let's make some member changes to a group.
In Cognos Security I'll navigate to the BI Marketing Managers role. Here I'll go the properties page to delete and existing member and add a new one.
When finished I'll rerun the query in the audit console and see that the member changes have also been captured.
In a final example I'll modify a report is Cognos Connection and change some properties of the schedule.
Here a couple more run days will be added, the start time changed, and a PDF output added.
Again these changes are captured by the audit monitor.
So far you've seen the type of detail that the NetVisn Audit Monitor captures,
and Cognos Administrators will routinely use this to see the latest activity in the content store.
What I want to show next are the console options and how they can be used to focus on specific data to answer different types of questions.
For example, since the dispatcher service settings can have an impact on performance, let's look at the history of all the configuration changes.
I'll set the date filter to Any Date, and the Change Type filter to Configuration
By default the results are sorted descending by date which you can change here.
Results can also be grouped. In this case I'll group by account
Something else usually important to keep track of are changes related to security.
A Change Type of Security will locate all security related changes including object permission or changes to groups, roles and capabilities.
In this example let's group by date and to make the results a little easier to read I'll remove the Timestamp column.
Another great use of the Audit Console is to find out who is using the Cognos Studios since the Audit Monitor also checks for changes to report specifications.
This can be used to make sure users with studio capabilities are actually using that licensed ability.
For this I choose the Change Type of Specification and Group by Account.
In the results you can see that new spec versions have been created.
Next I'll remove the detail and just show counts for each group.
This query can now be run on the different object types to determine which studios are being used
When the audit monitor detects a specification change that also triggers archiving of the current spec NetVisn.
For more information on this check out the Envisn video Cognos Report Versioning in NetVisn.
For the final example, suppose you needed to track all of the changes made by a specific user.
As you can see there are filters for Object Name and Location that use a simple contains match.
In this case I'll use the Accounts filter. This works by typing in characters to match on accounts, groups and roles.
If a group or role is selected the results will be filtered on the members.
I'll select the administrator account.
All the audit results can also be imported into Excel by just changing the Output Format.
Wrapping this up, the NetVisn Audit Monitor is a very unique tool which will help you manage all your Cognos environments.
This feature provides a complete history of all object property changes, monitors any type of security change and will help you manage all report development activity.
For more information on other NetVisn features please visit: envisn.com/netvisn