Why adding a user group membership is missing from the audit log

Products

• CA Harvest Software Change Manager

Issue/Introduction

Usually when a user is added to the Administrator group, a record is created in the harauditevent table. However, sometimes a user is in Administrator group but there is no record in this table. 

This article explains why. 

Environment

Harvest/SCM version 14.0 and higher

Resolution

Some reasons could be

1.  The group membership for the user was created before upgrading to a version of Harvest that had the audit log. I think this feature was added with 12.0 or 12.1.
2.  The group membership record in the audit log was deleted or the log file truncated for some reason
3.  The group membership was added by direct SQL update to the database.
4.  If a user that previously was a member of the Administrator group, and then went into the properties for the user and changed the username, the new username would automatically be a member of the Administrator group 

5.  If LDAP is used for authentication the user group membership can be changed in LDAP