Audit Policy Maintenance enables you to create and maintain audit policies—from simple to more complex—for application events, database events, and internal system events. You create audit policies that are used at run time to define exactly the audit data you want to record; you choose which events to audit and to what level. (You can also audit changes to the audit policy if you enable policy changes as an auditable event.) Once you create a policy and enable audit events, you check for and resolve any policy conflicts you find, activate the policy, commit the policy changes to the database, and begin recording audit data.

OpenEdge includes several preconfigured policies to help you get started with auditing. You can import the policies and use them as they are or modify them to suit your auditing needs. You fine-tune auditing through the polices you create. You control how much audit data is generated (and how much audit processing occurs); if you do not need to audit a particular event, simply do not enable it for auditing. Through Audit Policy Maintenance you can also import and export audit policy configurations in XML file format between systems and use for backup purposes. For details about what auditable events are included in the preconfigured policies, see Preconfigured audit policies.

Audit Policy Maintenance allows you to manage the following capabilities:

  • Auditing with multiple policies — You can create and activate more than one policy in the same database. If more than one policy is in effect at run time, the policy settings are aggregated.

    You can segment your policy into multiple parts that are common to all databases, unique to a single database, or comprised of events that can be turned on or off at the same time. You can also define multiple policies in a database to enable switching between policies to accommodate different operational conditions.

  • Resolving audit policy conflicts — Since you can create and activate more than one policy at once in the same database, it is possible that a conflict between policies might develop. For this reason, OpenEdge implements a set of rules for handling audit policy conflict resolution. Make every effort to check on and resolve conflicts before you commit the changes to the database and activate the policies.

    For details about the conflict resolution rules, see Resolve audit policy conflicts.

  • Easy performance tuning — You control performance and space use by selecting which events to audit and to what level, along with which policies you want to activate and deactivate, using Audit Policy Maintenance. The more events you audit, the more audit data you generate and the greater the performance overhead. By being able to selectively control what you are auditing, you can better manage processing overhead and potential audit data storage concerns.

For more information about audit policy creation and management, see the Audit Policy Maintenance Help. You can access the help either from within Audit Policy Maintenance or by selecting Start > Programs > OpenEdge > Help > Application Help.