Do you know who is accessing to which report at what time at your reporting environment ? As you delivered
the BI Publisher reports to
the production environment and your users start using them as part of their daily business operations you might wonder such questions. With compliance becoming an integral part of any business requirement, auditing your reporting environment is also becoming one of
the most critical and hot agenda in today’s enterprise reporting deployments. Also, I believe that auditing
the reporting environment is not just for
the compliance, but also
the way to understand how your users are using
the reports and be able to improve
the user reporting experience. BI Publisher have introduced Enterprise Level Auditing feature with its 11G release, with an integration of Oracle Fusion Middleware Audit Framework, which comes out of
the box with
the installation. Yes, this is another
great example of
the benefit of its tight integration with Fusion Middleware introduced with BI Publisher 11g release. What Information Can I Know about our Reporting Environment? With this new Auditing feature you can now gain
the following insights. When a particular user login or logout What report is accessed by who and when and how How long does it take to process a particular report Yes, it’s all there. This is a
great news for 10G users, right ? I used to be one of them working with many different IT organizations and were craving for this, but it’s here now with 11G! How Can I Access to
the Auditing Information? With
the Fusion Middleware Auditing Framework, BI Publisher feed such information either to a log file or to a database. If you decided to get
the data into
the database then, of course you know, you can use BI Publisher to report and publish, or visualize
the data to gain more insights. One thing though, in order to feed
the data it requires a few extra steps, which I’ll cover it later. Regardless of whether it’s
the log file or
the database to store
the Auditing data, first, you need to enable
the Auditing feature, which is not enabled as default. So, let’s take a look at how to enable it. How to Enable Auditing Feature? Here is a quick list of
the steps: Enable Auditing related properties in BI Publisher configuration file Copy component_events.xml file to Fusion Middleware Audit Framework’s location Enable Auditing Policy with Fusion Middleware Control (Enterprise Manager) Restart WebLogic Server Enable Auditing related properties in BI Publisher configuration file Open xmlp-server-config.xml file, which is located under $BI_HOME/ user_projects/domains/bifoundation_domain/config/bipublisher/repository/Admin/Configuration directory. Set
the following three properties values to ‘true’. AUDIT_ENABLED MONITORING_ENABLED AUDIT_JPS_INTEGRATION
The ‘AUDIT_JPS_INTEGRATION’ is not in
the file as default, so you need to add this. Here is an example of how it looks for
the xmlp-server-config.xml file after
the modification. <?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8" standalone="no"?><xmlpConfigxmlns="http://xmlns.oracle.com/oxp/xmlp"> <property name="SAW_SERVER" value="adc6160510"/> <property name="SAW_SESSION_TIMEOUT" value="90"/> <property name="DEBUG_LEVEL" value="exception"/> <property name="SAW_PORT" value="7001"/> <property name="SAW_PASSWORD" value=""/> <property name="SAW_PROTOCOL" value="http"/> <property name="SAW_VERSION" value="v6"/> <property name="SAW_USERNAME" value=""/> <property name="SAW_URL_SUFFIX" value="analytics/saw.dll"/> <property name="MONITORING_ENABLED" value="true"/> <property name="MONITORING_DEFAULT_HISTORY_SIZE" value="30"/> <property name="AUDIT_ENABLED" value="true"/> <property name="JSESSION_RESET_DISABLED" value="true"/> <property name="SECURITY_MODEL" value="ORACLE_AS_JPS"/> <property name="AUDIT_JPS_INTEGRATION" value="true"/> </xmlpConfig> Copy component_events.xml file to Audit Framework’s location There is a Audit related configuration file provided by BI Publisher that needs to be copied to
the Audit Framework location. 1. Go to
the following directory. $BI_HOME /oracle_common/modules/oracle.iau_11.1.1/components 2. Create a directory called ‘xmlpserver’ 3. Copy component_events.xml file from /user_projects/domains/bifoundation_domain/config/bipublisher/repository/Admin/Audit To
the newly created ‘xmlpserver’ directory. Enable Auditing Policy with Fusion Middleware Control (EM) Now you can set a level of
the auditing for each BI Publisher’s auditing type by using Fusion Middleware Control (a.k.a. Enterprise Manager). 1. Login to Fusion Middleware Control UI http://hostname:port/em (e.g. reporting.oracle.com:7001/em) 2. Access to Audit Policy configuration UI from
the menu Under WebLogic Domain, right-click bifoundation_domain, select Security and then click Audit Policy. 3. Set Audit Level for BI Publisher. While you can select ‘Custom’ to set a customized level of Auditing for each component, I’m selecting ‘Medium’ for this exercise. Restart WebLogic Server After all
the above settings, now you need to restart
the WebLogic Server instance in order to take those changes in effect. If you’re on Windows you can simply do this by selecting ‘Stop BI Servers’ and ‘Start BI Servers’ from
the Start menu. If you’re on Linux then you can run ‘stopWebLogic.sh’ and ‘startWebLogic.sh’, which can be found under $BI_HOME/user_projects/domains/bifoundation_domain/bin Start Auditing! Now assuming that you have completed
the above steps successfully, then from this point on any reporting activity should be audited and stored in
the auditing log file, which can be found at $BI_HOME/user_projects/domains/bifoundation_domain/servers/AdminServer/logs/auditlogs/xmlpserver/audit.log And here is a sample of
the log file: 2011-02-18 02:25:49.928 "" "ReportRendering" true - "82d4bdc47b99b33c:-7e3f334f:12e365c4d9c:-8000-0000000000000022,0" - - - - "bipublisher(11.1.1)" "ReportExecution" "200" "" "/Sample Lite/Published Reporting/Reports/Balance Letter.xdo" "pdf" "RTF Corp Styles" "en_US" - - - - - - - - - - - - - - 86608512 486989824 24517 169 - - - 2011-02-18 02:25:49.929 "steve.jobs" "ReportRequest" true - "82d4bdc47b99b33c:-7e3f334f:12e365c4d9c:-8000-0000000000000022,0" - - - - "bipublisher(11.1.1)" "ReportAccess" "200" "" "" "pdf" "RTF Corp Styles" - - - true - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - 2011-02-18 03:25:49.554 "" "ReportDataProcess" true - "82d4bdc47b99b33c:-7e3f334f:12e365c4d9c:-8000-0000000000000022,0" - - - - "bipublisher(11.1.1)" "ReportExecution" "260" "" "/Sample Lite/Published Reporting/Reports/Balance Letter.xdo" - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - 34980200 554033152 - 134 - - - 2011-02-18 03:25:50.282 "" "ReportRendering" true - "82d4bdc47b99b33c:-7e3f334f:12e365c4d9c:-8000-0000000000000022,0" - - - - "bipublisher(11.1.1)" "ReportExecution" "263" "" "/Sample Lite/Published Reporting/Reports/Balance Letter.xdo" "pdf" "RTF Corp Styles" "en_US" - - - - - - - - - - - - - - 16158944 554033152 24517 503 - - - 2011-02-18 03:25:50.282 "steve.jobs" "ReportRequest" true - "82d4bdc47b99b33c:-7e3f334f:12e365c4d9c:-8000-0000000000000022,0" - - - - "bipublisher(11.1.1)" "ReportAccess" "263" "" "" "pdf" "RTF Corp Styles" - - - true - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - 2011-02-18 03:30:00.448 "barack.obama" "UserLogin" true - "82d4bdc47b99b33c:-7e3f334f:12e365c4d9c:-8000-0000000000000406,0" - - - - "bipublisher(11.1.1)" "UserSession" "26" "" - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - From
the above log file you can tell a user ‘steve.jobs’ was running some reports like ‘Balance Letter’ around afternoon on 2/18 and another user ‘barack.obama’ logged into
the system at 3:30 on
the same day. Yes, every login and log out will be recorded, and every report access will be recorded in this log file. Now, looking at this text file to understand what’s going on is pretty overwhelming. And accessing to this log file, which is located at
the server’s file system where
the BI Publisher/WebLogic Server are running, is another challenge in typical deployment scenarios. And that’s where
the database storage option for
the Auditing data comes into a picture. I’ll talk about this tomorrow, so stay tuned!
