When creating a new application, one of the aspects to consider is auditing your data. Remedy provides a easy-to-use solution to create audit forms quickly. But those audit forms can be very simple or very complex. Some best practices can be applied to easy create an outstanding audit system.

In this post I will show you an audit strategy that allows you to take the most of your ARS system.

Planning your audit needs

The first question you must make to yourself is: “Why I need to audit the data?” The most common answers are:

The answer to this question defines the type of audit you must configure:

For instance if you want to compute a KPI about assignment changes based on audit, is easier to do on an full audit, instead of a log audit. But log audits are easier to read by users.

My recommendation is to always choose log audits and compute statistics or planned workflow on audit by other means. For instance, the previous KPI can be done in another form, a Remedy KPI or other ways.

How many audit forms do I need

Remedy allows you to select the audit form for each form. Thus, you can share the same audit form with many forms, or you can use an independent audit form for each form. Even when the audit form is shared, information is not messed, since the name of the form is available. So, I think that it is a better choice to use only one log audit form and share it for all forms in your application, because there is no payoff and you get a benefit: a consolidated audit between forms. That means, for instance, that you can track one user activity between forms, and see that just after a invoice was created, the detail lines started to be created (both items belonging to different forms).

I said that there is no payoff of using only one audit form… well this is not 100% true, but we can make it true. The counterpart of it is that users can be lost inside that amount of data.

Customizing the audit form

Remedy has a lot of constraints regarding audit forms. You can’t add new data fields or workflow that modifies the audit. There are good security reasons for it. But, allowing workflow that computes data also provides some good tools and possibilities like:

You can achieve the most of these objectives by using active links and display-only fields, but you won’t allow your users to search by surname or user location. There is a way to allow you to “customize” the audit form to your needs: create a new regular form and copy the contents of the audit form:

Now you have two audit forms, the actual one and the copy. And now you are free to customize your copy, creating as many fields and filters as you need that will fire at submit.

The next figure summarizes the concept:

Accessing each audit separatelly

My recommendation is to include at every form that is using this shared audit, a table pointing to the customized audit form with the qualification limiting the results to the current form and current request like: (‘Form’ = “TR:FFG:Invoice”) AND (‘Original Entry ID’ = $Request ID$)

You can include computed fields like the user full name, to enhance the usability of the form.

Creating an audit manager

My last recommendation is to create a display only form that includes the next elements: