View detailed information on admin actions

To improve visibility into user actions, Connectivity Hub has introduced functionality to allow you to view detailed information regarding key user actions performed in Connectivity Hub, including target creation and editing, content source modifications, connection modifications, updated Connectivity Hub system configurations, and task activations. 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 Connectivity Hub 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 Connectivity Hub configuration database.

• In Connectivity Hub 4.2, audit logging is only supported for the following actions:

  • Target modification

  • Content source modification

  • Connection modification

  • Task activation

  • Updated system configurations

Enabling admin action reporting

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

1. In the Connectivity Hub installation folder, navigate to the Connectivity Hub installation folder.

2. Open the Connectivity Hub admin site web.config file in a text editor.

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

4. Save the file.

Visualizing your user action data

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

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: "Connectivity Hub 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 Connectivity Hub data.

Overview of collected admin action data

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

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.