Auditing in Office 365 Sites

Introduction

The audit feature in SharePoint helps you track user activities. It tells you Whochanged What, When and Where.

Providing accurate information and keeping it accurate is critical to any business. Tracking user activity and ensuring data changes are audited is important so that when mistakes happen you can quickly fix them. In most business scenarios, Auditing is a critical business requirement.

In Offcie 365, The SharePoint Online environment provides you with 3 primary configuration options for audit at the Site collection level:

1. Audit Log Trimming
2. Audit settings for Documents and Items
3. Audit settings for Lists, Libraries and Sites

Audit Log Trimming

The Audit Log Trimming settings Allow you to specify whether you want to automatically trim the audit log for the current site collection. Audit log trimming might be worthwhile if you have a very active site and are concerned about the size of the log.

Optionally specify the number of days to retain:

• The number of days to store the audit report.

Also you can select the location to store the audit report.

The audit log captures the following information for the events that are selected to be audited.

Documents and Items Level

• Editing items
• Checking out or checking in items
• Moving or copying items to another location in the site
• Deleting or restoring items

Lists, Libraries, and Sites

• Editing content types and columns
• Searching site content
• Editing users and permissions

How to Configure audit settings for a site collection?

• Go to Site Setting on the root site collection
• On the Site Settings page, under Site Collection Administration, select Site collection audit settings.

• On the Configure Audit Settings page, in the Audit Log Trimming section, set Automatically trim the audit log for this site? to Yes.
• Optionally, specify the number of days of audit log data to retain.
• You can also specify the document library to save audit reports to before the audit log is trimmed.

How to View Audit reports?

The events you selected are captured in the audit reports. You can export the report on Microsoft Excel 2013 format and can be accessed from the Auditing Reports page.

1. Go to  Site Settings page
2. Under Site Collection Administration, Select Audit log reports
3. From here, you can run the available Content Activity Reports, Information Management Policy Reports, Security and Site Settings Reports or create Custom Reports.

Give this a try and see it for yourself.