UMRA – Web Based User Audit and Logging

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If you want to learn the basics on how to connect to UMRA with its COM object, please see my original post on “Basics of UMRA COM”.

UMRA – Web Based User Audit and Logging

When creating an ASP PHP .NET etc. UMRA web portal that edits, creates or modifies active directory objects, you want to have some logging system that will allow you to audit actions that were taken on these active directory objects. Now, UMRA of course has the ability to connect to SQL, Oracle, and other databases, so you can also manage these systems information and log it. However, for this blog post, we will only talk about to log all actions through a UMRA web portal. Now some of you might be asking, what can be logged. The quick answer is everything, any action, any search, anything. You can go as far as logging when someone searches for users, when someone looks at an active directories account details. However, again for this blog post we will just focus on how you would log just the actions that take effect or modify something in active directory. Now if you haven’t already, you should read my other blog posts on how to loop through UMRA datatable, and how to get the basics of the UMRA COM object connection.

UMRA COM Connection: http://umratips.blogspot.com/2009/04/connect-to-umra-with-com-object.html
Loop Through DataTable: http://umratips.blogspot.com/2009/04/umra-com-object-loop-through-data-table.html

UMRA – Web Based User Audit and Logging Tips

So as I’ve stated you can log almost any action in an UMRA web portal, even down to what your users are searching for, however, we are going to stick to a high level approach when doing our tracking and auditing. Now there are multiple ways you can get your auditing trail setup, for my application approaches, I always will log my actions to a SQL database, however it’s up to you where you log your information, if you plan to have a lot of users managing Active directory with your UMRA web portal, going towards some sort of database logging mechanism is critical, and far more flexible down the road.

Step 1:
Figure out where you want to store your logging data. This can be in a many different places, MS Access, MSSQL, MYSQ L, ORACLE its really up to you, whatever you have available to you, will work fine.

Step 2:
Get your list of functions you want to log from within your UMRA web portal. Maybe you have a create user, or edit your functions.

Step 3:
Within your UMRA Automation Project use the “Update Database” action to log the data to your database. The “Update Database” action has a setup wizard that will walk you through most of your connections to your most popular database types.

Step 4:
Now that the data is logged, you should have a webpage that will pull this data from the database. There are 2 ways you can do this, your webpage can call the database directly, or you can have an UMRA Automation Project create a generic table with the data in it. Then you would loop through that table.

So there it is, a quick an easy way to get your UMRA web portal actions logged to a database, so now you will have a complete audit trail of your portals actions. In a later post I will show you how you can integrate these logs into your user searches, so when you pull up a user account, you can see all the actions taken on it.