Generating user activity reports in Datacom

Products

• Datacom
• Datacom/AD
• Datacom/DB

Issue/Introduction

We would like to keep an eye on Datacom/DB activities and users. Can you provide me with a command/report or a utility which can be used to generate a report of all user activities?

Environment

Component : CA Datacom/DB

Component : CA Datacom/AD

Resolution

From the explanation of the request, it sounds like you want the ability to capture information on any user that accesses any Datacom table. Whether it is a business user reading or updating a database table, or a systems programming user changing a database definition or loading or unloading data, you would like to know this.

As you might expect, expecting the database engine to monitor this information would require that every transaction processed would be tracked, and this would cause serious performance degradation due to the number of audit records that might be produced even during a simple read transaction in an application program. 

However, there are possible alternatives to get you different pieces of this information.

If you are using Datacom External Security, then all accesses are managed through your ESM. In this case, I would suspect that you could set up auditing for specific users or for specific Datacom resources within the security database, and then use standard security reporting to produce this information. This is not particular to Datacom, and I would recommend that you contact the support team for your security product if you have questions about setting up or reporting on auditing details. If you are not using External Security on a MUF, you will not be able to track read requests.

Within the Datacom scope, if you have enabled Logging and Recovery for database tables (this is the default), every maintenance activity to the table (add, update, or delete) will cause Logging transactions to be captured in the LXX, and these would be stored in the Recovery file (RXX) if you have spilled the data to those files. Once the data is in the RXX, you can then review this at any later time to see what was changed.

If you are interested in seeing who updated a table in a given database, you could use standard RXX reporting as described in the Datacom documentation for DBUTLTY reporting on the Recovery File. This is also explained in Knowledge Base article 16948, titled "Tracking Datacom changes by userid."

For more detailed reporting at the individual field level, we have a software tool available that you can request from our development team. Please see Knowledge Base article 55142, titled "Datacom RXX change capture and audit reporting using Dataminer routines" to see if this would help you monitor database changes.

As always, please contact Broadcom support for CA Datacom if you have further questions.