Audit trail management

An important aspect of station security is preserving an audit trail of user activity. The station commissioning process installs and enables the AuditHistoryService by default. This service creates a record for each user-initiated change to each component in the station.

Setting up an effective audit trail involves establishing your company’s history policies. How often are you going to export histories from each controller station to the Supervisor station?

There are two sides to an audit trail configuration:

  • Setting up a controller station involves deciding what information to track. From the controller side, backing up histories to a Supervisor station is a push process. The controller station creates an export descriptor for each history and can then push the history to the Supervisor station manually or automatically on a regular schedule.
  • Managing all station histories in the Supervisor station involves creating folders to group histories, which quickly can number in the thousands. This is a pull process. The Supervisor discovers the histories available from each controller station and creates an import descriptor for each history.