View detailed information on admin actions

To improve visibility into user actions, AutoClassifier allows you to view detailed information regarding key user actions performed in the AutoClassifier administation portal, including pipeline creation and modification, component creation and modification, adapter creation and modification, and logging modifications. The log details for these actions will also capture details on the user who performed the action, the timestamp of the action, the type of action, and the communicated data before and after the changes.

To view your admin action data, you can query the database or use a reporting tool, such as Grafana. For more information on how Grafana can connect to your AutoClassifier database, see Grafana data sources in the Grafana documentation.

Prerequisites

To be able to view reports on administration actions, the following is required

  • If you are using Grafana for reporting:

    • Grafana must be installed.

    • In Grafana, you must configure a Microsoft SQL data source to facilitate communication with your SQL server instance and your AutoClassifier configuration database.

  • Audit logging is only supported for the following actions:

    • Online and offline pipeline creation and modification

    • Pipeline component creation, modification, and sequencing

    • Adapter creation and modification

    • Logging modifications

Enabling admin action reporting

By default, the admin action reporting feature is disabled. To enable it, do the following:

  1. Navigate to the AutoClassifier installation folder.

  2. Open the web.config file of the AutoClassifier admin site in a text editor.

  3. In the <appSettings>, change the key="EnableSourceSystemAPILogging" value to True.

  4. Save the file.

Refer to the following example of the JSON file that is saved to the AutoClassifier logs for admin actions:

[
    {
        "Id":"73dbf2c8-661a-4604-a1f9-6e8b818cc1ab",
        "Name":"Test",
        "properties":[
            {
                "PropertyName":"Enabled",
                "OldValue":"False",
                "NewValue":"True"
            }
        ],
        "IsAdded":false,
        "IsDeleted":false,
        "IsModified":true,
        "IsExported":false
    }
]

  • The fields IsAdded, IsDeleted, IsModified, and IsExported define if the item is newly added, deleted, modified, or exported. Only one field is set to True for each audit entry.

  • If an item is modified, the properties that were modified are displayed in the properties field with the old and new values.

Visualizing your user action data

AutoClassifier can use a reporting tool, such as Grafana, to display your user action reports. The following steps show how you can connect Grafana to AutoClassifier:

  1. Ensure that you have completed the prerequisites for Grafana integration.

  2. In Grafana, click Dashboards from the menu.

  3. Click New > Import. For more information, see Import dashboards in the Grafana documentation.

  4. Optionally, you can change the dashboard name, folder, or UID to your preference.

  5. Upload the following JSON file: AutoClassifier Audit Logs.

    • When you select the link above, right click the page, select Save as... and save the JSON file.

  6. Select the data source you created in the prerequisites.

  7. Click Import.

  8. Verify that your dashboard is receiving your AutoClassifier data.

Overview of collected admin action data

The following table describes the audit log information for every admin action event that is captured by AutoClassifier:

Property  
ID This is the ID of the audit log request.
Action This is the method that was used by the request. Possible values for this column include POST, PUT, and DELETE.
OldValues This is the model for the old values before the change was made by the admin.
NewValues This is the model for the new values after the change was made by the admin.
RequestPayload This is the entire payload that was sent from the browser to your database.
Differences This specifies every difference between the OldValues and NewValues columns, signifying everything that was changed by the admin.
ChangedBy This specifies who was the admin user who made the specific updates. If your environment supports anonymous access, this column will state Anonymous.
Description This provides a description of the action that was performed.
ApiRoute This specifies the API route that was called when the action was performed.
ChangedAt This provides the timestamp for when the action was performed.