Very often Content Administrators seek history of activities performed on an item like edit, publish, workflow approval etc. Though we have options like Sitecore Log Analyzer, it requires developers’ assistance while it is critical to equip Content Administrators to function independently.
Sitecore Powershell comes with a super cool report, ‘Find Audit Trail from logs’ which crawls through the logs for the specified timeframe yielding all the audit logs (without exceptions etc. ;), Sitecore Log Analyzer will need to be used for analyzing exceptions). I haven’t seen much mention of this report and speaking to a few people it seems to have been missed/unnoticed. Here is how you can access the same,
Like any other Sitecore Powershell report, we do have the export and filter options available in this report as well, which makes our life easier.
We experienced one issue which was specifically due to an error in the format of certain log entries,
Few log entries in our instance were having a weird additional spacing before the thread id though the log4net conversionPattern etc. were correct. This appeared to the root cause for the above issue,
Updating the following line to remove empty entries fixed the issue,
By default Sitecore Powershell Reports are enabled only for Administrators. When it is needed for other roles, we will be needing to provide read access to /sitecore/content/Documents and settings/All users/Start menu/Right/Reporting Tools/PowerShell Reports item in core database.
If we are looking to provide access only for this specific report, then deny access will need to be added to other reports under /sitecore/system/Modules/PowerShell/Script Library/SPE/Reporting/Content Reports/Reports item in master database. It is important to note that the Content Author will be able to view history of activities performed on all the items including the ones for which they might not have access.
This Report was introduced in Powershell Extensions 5.0, if you are using an older version, you could use this package.
If you are using Sitecore PAAS with Azure Application Insights, you will be needing Application Insights App ID/Key and will be needing to fetch the logs using Azure Application Insights Queries. The below blog will be helpful for PAAS setup, https://www.sitecoregabe.com/2019/09/azure-application-insights-logs.html
References:
https://www.sitecoregabe.com/2018/08/basic-sitecore-audit-trail-with.html
https://github.com/SitecorePowerShell/Console/issues/1033