BI Platform: BusinessObjects Auditing Considerations & Enabling

Posted by Manikandan Elumalai Jun 3, 2013

Dear Folks,
This is the continuation of my previous blog on BusinessObjects Audit Universe and reports deployment here
SAP BusinessObjects 4.0 Auditor Configuration & Deployment End to End and is supposed to be successor
of this blog. I would like to talk about Audit considerations, how it works and the process of enabling auditing in
BusinessObjects.
As you all aware auditing enables us to have a detailed historical view of user and object interaction and the
system usage over a period of time. Based on the audit reports we can identify usage pattern of the business
community such as peak usage, unused reports and inactive users. Further this will help us to fine tune
environment for effective utilization.
Auditing considerations
While implementing Auditing requirements we should be in a position to consider the below factors.
By implementing System auditing we are imposing additional load to the system which need to be
considered during initial sizing exercises.
We should precisely identify the required system metrics without including redundant information from
audit tables as auditing unnecessary metrics will again increase system load.

How auditing works in BusinessObjects

Audit information will be collected from the servers which are enabled for their auditable actions. The collected
information will be stored in the form of audit log files in the BusinessObjects server locally. As per the polling
interval configured, the CMS would be collecting this log details and adds them in to audit database to make
it ready for reporting. Thus audit information will be always historical. If you want to extract the real-time
information of the repository CMS database will be the only source of truth.
Enabling/Disabling trace logs
To enable and disable trace logs at various levels refer the blog here Configuring trace Logs in
BusinessObjects 4.0
Enabling System auditing

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BI Platform: BusinessObjects Auditing - Considerations & Enabling

For audit enablement we should always configure a database to hold the set of audit tables as a first step.
Subsequently we should identify list of actions to be captured and enable them as auditable. CMC is the place
where you need to do all these stuff.

Deployment of Audit Universe and reports

You can refer the blog here for as-is samples of Audit universe and reports and their deployment. SAP
BusinessObjects 4.0 Auditor Configuration & Deployment End to End. If required you can even customize and
develop your own set of reports on top of this.

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Hope the blog is informative and helpful. Thanks for reading.

7378 Views Tags: bo4_auditor, sap_businessobjects_business_intelligence_platform_4.0

Patrick Delage in response to Manikandan Elumalai on page 3

Mar 30, 2014 2:43 PM
Thanks. We have BO 4.0 SP5 FP3 in Oracle audit (4.1 in couple of month). I used the oracle audit universe
we can obtain somewhere, don't really remember where.
So, you confirm what I say about scheduling vs Ad hoc. Like I said, it make sense but our business like
to know how our users used the web intelligence. For sure, I can substract total refresh duration (include
scheduling) minus scheduling duration. But then, if you start to drill and try to understand, it's not possible.
(Without micro analysis)
Also, like I said, what about Ad hoc without saving ? We have about 200 users logs during a normal day, this
is very important to count.
By the way, I build explorer space in Explorer to used all this.

I continue, I never give up.!

Manikandan Elumalai in response to Patrick Delage on page 3
Mar 30, 2014 7:28 AM
Thanks for your words Patrick. much appreciated. Would you mind sharing your BusinessObjects version as
the Audit schema has been completely changed in BI4.x compared to XIR2 & XI.3.x. Good question to be
frank. When you say about Scheduling it involves report refresh and report scheduling activities where as for
adhoc requests its only report refresh.
Patrick Delage in response to Manikandan Elumalai on page 4
Mar 29, 2014 3:31 PM
So far, the best articles on Audit. But I have to be honest, I get hard time with audit database / universe to get
right information.
One of them, maybe you have a solution. In your dcument, you tell to how get scheduled vs Ad hoc
information. This is one of my answer I search for about 2 weeks. No joke.
When I filter refresh (Ad hoc) information, it mix it with scheduling information. It's like audit write a refresh
information for each scheduling. Which make sense...maybe but from a client perspective, I like to have these
two metric separatly...

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BI Platform: BusinessObjects Auditing - Considerations & Enabling

Also, if a user open a new web intelligence and make a refresh, without saving the reports, is this will be collect
in audit ?
Sirisha Mantha in response to Manikandan Elumalai on page 4
Jul 17, 2013 1:28 AM
Thank you Mani,
I'll read through these & get back if I have more questions. Thanks again for your inputs & time.
Manikandan Elumalai in response to Sirisha Mantha on page 4
Jul 16, 2013 10:31 AM
Hello Sirisha,
Have a look at ASUG presentation here. Should help you answering your questions related to BI 4.0 Audit.
http://events.asug.com/2012BOUC/1309_Audit_Thyself_Using_SAP_BusinessObjects_4_0.pdf
As far as the Peak load is concerned I would suggest you to try with Wily Introscope here instead of Auditing.
Wily Introscope for BI Platform 4.0: Why it is important and how to get started
Regards,
Mani
Sirisha Mantha
Jul 16, 2013 9:31 AM
Hi Mani,
I'm tuned to your posts. Good one as always.
We've turned on Auditing, configured the ADS & Audit universe(by downloading), but when running some basic
reports, cannot understand the metrics that are being returned. Is there a place or a document which talks
about how to interpret the various event measures being recorded as a part of auditing? Also, what is best way
to estimate the peak usage using the objects in the audit universe? By no. of logons or no. of objects accessed
or something else? Thanks.

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