Delegate365 changelog version 4.4-auditing changes

With Delegate365 version 4.4 we changed the auditing format in the portal. Auditing works in the same way as before and logs all operations, but the way how data is stored and handled has been changed. Read the details here.

• Why did we change the storage format? Well, we have customers with many users and objects in Office365. Since Delegates executes automatic sync operation multiple times a day Delegate can gather a lot of (changed) data each time. So we had instances of D365 running where the auditing log was some million lines long. With the logging the D365 SQL database grew immeasurably and the auditing log took a long time to open (or download) the list in the D365 portal. In some cases the auditing log could not be opened since the data fetching from the database took too long.
  So we needed to change that. The new logging saves data to an CSV file instead to the SQL database on a monthly basis. By outsourcing logging the D365 database stays small and performant while D365 can make use of simply appending lines to the logfiles.
• Has the auditing changed? No, but we also did optimize the logging. During sync operations in former versions of D365 the automatic OU-assignments have been logged even if there was no change. This was removed since the information “user x was assigned to OU y” is irrelevant if this assignment has been in place before. So we also saved some logging lines (and time). All other operations are logged as before.
• How does the new auditing look like? The menu administration / auditing now shows a list of files. Each calendar month is stored in one CSV file, f.e. 2015-07-delegate365.csv.
  
• What happened to historic logs? We converted all existing logs from the database into the new CSV files. So no information is lost, just the handling changed since we now have files. The content of the files can also be opened in D365, Admins have to select a file and then click “Open file” to see the content (as before).
• Logging conversion exceptions: For some D365 customers it is possible that there are not historic monthly files, but weekly or daily files since the data amount was too large. We wanted to reach good performance so we splitted very large monthly files to smaller files in some cases.
  
  The “new” logging (from now on) will always be monthly. 
• (How) can I download a logfile? The download is easy. When selecting one logfile you can “open file” (to see the content in a D365 list), “Download CSV” or “Download Excel”.
  
• Open logfile: When opening a logfile Admins can see the content directly – as before in D365.
  
  The logfile is opened and provided as searchable and pageable list in D365 .
• Download multiple files: When selecting more than one file you can “Download CSV (ZIP) or “Download Excel”.
• CSV: You get a ZIP files with the selected CSV files inside.
  Once the ZIP is unzip you see the content with the CSV files.
  
• Excel: In case of choosing Excel you get a generated Excel file to download.
  (The Excel file is stored in the Office XML format and already is a zip file)…
   
  When opening the Excel file you will find all selected files in Excel sheets as shown in this sample.
  
  The Excel files could f.e. be used with Power Pivot in Office 365.
• How long will the logfiles be available? In the D365 portal we have around 10GB of space available for logfiles. The plan is to store the logfiles at least for the last year – or till this space is used. We will figure out a final plan how to handle that in future.
  Since the file handling (and download) is very easy and quick to use we recommend to download the logfiles from time to time anyway (and to store them for later auditing).

We think the new logging is a practicable way to handle the logging in a much more performant way and makes it easier to work with the auditing data (for later reporting or similar).

All existing productive D365 tenants have already been updated (end of July).
New D365 trials will automatically be available in the latest version.