Types of Auditing

Auditing almost means something different to everyone I speak to... just a few things people mean when they say “our system has auditing” to me are;

Business Operation Auditing. This is recording when a business operation is performed, such as “Hire Employee”. They usually signify that a whole lot of work has been done across the system’s databases and services.

Data Operation Auditing. This refers to tracking individual changes to database tables. For example, this might involve recording that a user performed an operation that caused the Employee table’s row with identifier “5” to have the “Hired” flag set to “true”.

System Auditing. This is usually what I would call tracing or instrumentation rather than auditing – i.e. outputting detailed information about the running of the system. This often uses the TraceSource class, performance counters, or might be custom statistics recorded in a database/file about long running tasks – it can take many forms.

I’m sure this list is by no means complete – it isn’t intended to be. It’s just designed to make you think “what do they mean by auditing?” when you’re reading the requirements for the shiny new system you’re about to write. What is it you need to achieve?

I’m also hopeful that when I visit you one day in the future and say “what do you mean by auditing?”... you’ll realise I’m just trying to make sure we’re talking about the same thing J

My next couple of posts will cover one approach to Data Operation Auditing in the Entity Framework, so stay tuned...

* You might think there’s a rather large gap in the above... what about Security Auditing? Well, I’ve left it out deliberately as I see that as more of a vertical slice compared to the horizontal list that I’ve come up with. In other words, it’s just a slightly different way to different cut it – I’d categorise Security Auditing as either System or Business Operation auditing, depending upon your requirements, the technology you’re using for authentication and authorisation, and how you choose to implement it.

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  June 25, 2015
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