Audit Logging

Post date: May 11, 2012 1:33:50 PM

Overview

Given the inclusion of Microsoft's ETL Logging pattern in QBO 3, we can leverage logging in a number of interesting ways, including:

• • Tracking performance (execution time) of methods and statements,

  • Tracking time spent on the phone by agents doing skip tracing,

  • Tracking who is executing "sensitive" methods or statements

Background

The ETL Logging pattern has some very nice features, including:

• • It is very lightweight, having minimal impact on the performance of code calling logging methods

  • If a log is broken, errors are not raised in code

  • Logging can be turned on or off from a configuration file (web.config)

  • When logging an activity, one can data-drive which logging sinks should record the activity

  • Custom logging sinks are easy to write, enabling us to log to a text file, Amazon Simple DB, our own Message or LedgerItem tables

Audit Logging

Each method or statement can include an Audit property, with a string of categories to log to. Examples:

In Decision.config

<Statement Name="Cancel" Query="UPDATE Decision SET CanceledDate=GETDATE()..." Audit="SecurityLog"/>

<Statement Name="ProcessStep" Query="..." Audit="BillingLog, SecurityLog"/>

In PaymentMessage.config

<Statement Name="StartCall" Query="..." Audit="AgentLog, BillingLog"/>

In ContactMethod.cs

[Audit("AgentLog")]

public void CallOutbound(string phoneNumber) {...}

Configuration

In web.config, the logging section can be configured like this:

<loggingConfiguration name="" tracingEnabled="true" defaultCategory="General">

<!-- These are the "sinks": classes we write to save logging data somewhere

<listeners>

<add name="FlatFile" type="..." listenerDataType="..." fileName="flatFile.log" formatter="Text Formatter" rollInterval="Day" />

<add name="LedgerItem" type="..." listenerDataType="..." rollInterval="Month" formatter="Ledger Formatter" />

<add name="Message" type="..." listenerDataType="..." formatter="Message Formatter" /> 

<add name="SkipTraceMessage" type="..." listenerDataType="..." formatter="SkipTrace Message" /> 

 ...

</listeners>

<!-- These allow a sink to data-drive the "body" of the log -->

<formatters>

<add type="..." template="{templated data goes here, including method and parameters}" name="Text Formatter" />

<add type="..." template="{templated data goes here, including method and parameters}" name="Message Formatter" />

<add type="..." template="{templated data goes here, including method and parameters}" name="SkipTrace Message" />

</formatters>

<!-- This allows turning all, or partial, logging on or off -->

<logFilters>

<add type="..." enabled="true" name="Logging Enabled Filter" />

</logFilters>

<-- This is where we map what audited logs are actually written to; if there is no listener defined, the log can be ignored -->

<categorySources>

<add switchValue="All" name="BillingLog">

<listeners>

<add name="LedgerItem" />

</listeners>

</add>

<add switchValue="All" name="AgentLog">

<listeners>

<add name="Message" />

</listeners>

</add>

</categorySources>

</loggingConfiguration>