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• "Book - Microsoft Dynamics CRM 2011 Customization & Configuration (MB2-866) Certification Guide - Chapter 7"
  Published by Neil Benson (Packt Publishing) on November 23, 2012
  http://my.safaribooksonline.com/book/certification/9781849685801/microsoft-dynamics-crm-2011-customization-and-configuration-mb2-866-certification/ch07_html

In Microsoft Dynamics CRM 2011, the auditing feature logs changes that are made to your customer records so that you can review those changes later. The auditing feature is designed to meet the auditing, compliance, security, and governance policies of many regulated enterprises.

The audit logs help you answer questions such as:

• Who updated this field value on this record, and when?
• What was the previous field value before it was updated?
• What actions has this user taken recently?
• Who deleted this record?

What can be audited?

The following operations can be audited:

1. Create, update, and delete operations on records.
2. Changes to the sharing privileges of a record.
3. The N:N association or disassociation of records.
4. Changes to security roles.
5. Audit changes at the entity, attribute, and organization level. For example, enabling audit on an entity.
6. Deletion of audit logs.
7. When (date/time) a user accesses Microsoft Dynamics CRM data, how long, and from what client

Configuring auditing

There are three steps required to configure auditing in Microosft Dynamics CRM 2011.
1. Configuring organization-level auditing.
2. Configuring entity-level auditing.
3, Configuring field-level auditing.

Auditing user access

If the organization-level auditing is enabled, you can record when a user logs in to Microosoft Dynamics CRM in your audit log by enabling user access auditing. The audit log of the user access is available in the Audit Summary View page.

Viewing the audit data

The methods available for viewing the audit data:
1. Audit Summary View
2. Audit History View for records

Managing the audit log

Audit operations are stored in an audit log. A seperate audit log is created every three months. Over time, these audit logs can consume a significant amount of storage on your database server (for the CRM on-premise deployments) or your allocated storage space (for the CRM Online deployment). If the database storage is a concern, you can delete the audit logs when it is no longer necessary to store them according to your organization's record retention policy.

Audit logs in the database

Audit operations are stored in the non-customizable audit system entity.

An audit log in Microsoft Dynamics CRM 2011 represents a logical collection of audit operations. How audit logs are managed depends on which version of Microsoft SQL Server is deployed.

Microosft Dynamics CRM 2011 uses Microsoft SQL Server as its database management system. 

For on-premise deployments that uses Microsoft SQL Server 2008 Enterprise or Datacenter editions, and for Microsoft Dynamics CRM Online, audit operations are stored in physical database partitions. A new physical partition is created every three months. Each partition acts like a separate table which ensures that the performance of the auditing feature isn't affected too much as the database grows. Each partition represents an audit log in Microsoft Dynamics CRM 2011 and is measured in kilobytes.

Microsoft SQL Server 2008 Standard Edition does not support database partitions so for on-premise deployments that uses Microsoft SQL Server 2008 Standard edition audit operations are stored in the CRM organization database. An audit log in Microosoft Dynamics CRM 2011 represents a collection of audit operations grouped by calendar quarter and is measured in rows.