Auditing tools support the following auditing management functions:

• Audit configuration — Creating and maintaining the audit policies that determine what is or can be audited in an application
• Audit archiving — Moving audit data (audit trails) from short-term, live application storage, to long-term archival storage
• Audit reporting — Generating human-readable reports on existing audit data and policies

OpenEdge provides general purpose auditing tools to perform the following auditing management functions:

• Auditing configuration using the OpenEdge Audit Policy Maintenance tool
• Audit archiving using the OpenEdge Audit Archiving utility
• Audit reporting using the Auditing Reports available from the Data Administration tool and character-mode Data Dictionary

For more information on these OpenEdge auditing tools, see Introduction to Security and Auditing.

However, you might want to write your own tools to accomplish these tasks. Each of the OpenEdge solutions has requirements or limitations that might not be appropriate for your auditing environment. For audit configuration and archiving, you might find it necessary to build your own tools in order to support specific input/output formats, to handle special audit policy configuration relationships, or to archive audit data in a different way.

The following sections describe OpenEdge support and basic requirements to develop the following custom auditing tools in ABL.

For reporting, it is impossible to anticipate all possible query requirements that you might have in a given environment. For an overview of audit query issues and where to find more information about writing custom audit reporting tools, see Introduction to Security and Auditing.