Book Excerpt: Auditing Metadata Changes

I thought I’d pull out a small section of my Dynamics CRM Deep Dive: Security book and discuss metadata changes.

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Auditing Metadata Changes

In a multi–administrator or multi–developer environment, it is sometimes difficult to determine who did what when tracking changes to Entities. The following metadata–related operations are tracked when auditing is enabled:

  • Delete Entity
  • Delete Attribute

 

Viewing the Audit Log

To view metadata changes, navigate to: Settings, Auditing, Audit Summary View.

Here is an example, showing the results of a deletion of an attribute:

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Opening the detail record shows us this:

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As you can see, we have the following information recorded:

  • Who
  • When
  • What entity
  • What attribute

 

Again, this is very handy information if you have multiple people performing modifications to your CRM system ( development server or otherwise ).

I just wish that the CRM product team would include Metadata Create and Update events in the Audit Log. THAT would be very handy indeed.

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