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.

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:

Opening the detail record shows us this:

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.