Audit trail

[Stephen Brush]

Hi,

We are curious if there is any support or extensions for audit related features, such as tracking the creator/date of new items and perhaps also the user related to modified records.

The only field I located in the DB was the last_modified date on the Item table. The only thread I came across referred to v1.5.

A separate but related ask is in the case of admins making security related updates this could also include what the changes were.

If audit features not implemented is there any reason other than it may not a popular need?

Thanks,

Steve

[Tim Donohue]

Hi Stephen,

At this time, DSpace doesn't have a full "audit trail".  DSpace does capture some common events​ (like original creation/deposit, workflow approval events, etc) in the "dc.description.provenance" metadata field (which is only visible to Administrators).  But, it's not a full audit trail of every change made to an Item (e.g. later Item modifications after the Item is deposited are not currently tracked in "dc.description.provenanace").  It is also possible for you to manually add your own notes into "dc.descripton.provenance", but only a limited set of events are tracked automatically.

Honestly, I think it would be possible for someone to enhance DSpace to provide a more complete audit in this same "dc.description.provenance" field (or a similar field).  I also suspect this would be a feature that would be of interest to others.

The only reason it hasn't been built yet is basically that it hasn't been donated or prioritized as highly as other features.  Features get added to DSpace through two main paths...

1. Either an institution builds the feature (or hires a service provider to build it) and donates it back to DSpace (in order to benefit the entire community)
2. Or, our DSpace Steering group finds a way to fund the feature (usually via community fundraising) and hires a service provider to build it on behalf the entire community

We do not have a centralized development team, so DSpace is very much a global collaboration.  If this feature is of high interest to you, we'd welcome you to consider contributing it back or potentially hiring a service provider to do so.  The DSpace Steering Group will also be discussing priorities for the 8.0 release in the coming weeks/months.  It's always possible this will come up then.. but as you might imagine, there can be a large number of wishful features, and I don't yet know where this one would fall on the priority list.

Tim

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From: dspace-c...@googlegroups.com <dspace-c...@googlegroups.com> on behalf of Stephen Brush <stepb...@gmail.com>
Sent: Thursday, March 2, 2023 9:11 AM
To: DSpace Community <dspace-c...@googlegroups.com>
Subject: [dspace-community] Audit trail

 

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[Andrea Schweer]

Hi Stephen / Tim / all,

Most actions are logged to the DSpace log, so another approach might be to look into log analysis tools. (At least that's how it worked up to DSpace 6 but I assume it's still the case in 7.) In order for that approach to make sense, some of the logging messages may need to be improved / adjusted for the information to be meaningful - most log messages include internal DSpace IDs that may need to be resolved against the DSpace database, etc.

cheers,

Andrea

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[Mark H. Wood]

On Fri, Mar 03, 2023 at 12:20:58PM +1300, 'Andrea Schweer' via DSpace Community wrote:
> Hi Stephen / Tim / all,
>
> Most actions are logged to the DSpace log, so another approach might be to
> look into log analysis tools. (At least that's how it worked up to DSpace 6
> but I assume it's still the case in 7.) In order for that approach to make
> sense, some of the logging messages may need to be improved / adjusted for
> the information to be meaningful - most log messages include internal
> DSpace IDs that may need to be resolved against the DSpace database, etc.

I would have said the same, but here DSpace 7 seems to log far less
than DSpace 6, apart from pairs of "REST received a request" and "REST
completed a request" (which tell me nothing of interest). I need to
spend some time examining the logging configuration.

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Mark H. Wood
Lead Technology Analyst

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