Some of us in the in the wide world of BO use universes as a method to segregate our reporting. This is logical since a universe is usually tied to a single database connection. Therefore little groups of reporting users tend to congregate around universes. Some of us have picked up on this little fact and we require a naming standard that allows us to identify those groups. Some may try to do this with report names, but most fail. Ok, let me get to the point…
In such a scenario you may want to track the activities of these groups. This is possible with Business Objects auditing services and the universe name recorded there; however, it does not work in every way you want it to. Universe is not a field in the auditing database tables as username or start_timestamp are. Universe will be found in the big melting pot that BO calls the Audit_Detail table. It is one of the many values that bless the detail_text field. Not bad news, but this will hurt your query performance.
So now that we know where to find the universe name in the auditing data, we need to talk about which Events or User Activities it accompanies. First the bad news: you won’t find it on any of the following BO Auditor event types: get page, edit document, or read document. This is bad news, but get over it, there is nothing you can do about it. So now for the good news: you will find it on Document Refresh and Generate SQL.
Just in case you are not already intimately familiar with these events let me tell you something about them:
Document Refresh: this is the interactive user refresh of a report, not the scheduled refresh
Generate SQL: this seems to be limited to saved changes to a query, or clicks on the “View SQL” button. Therefore, this may be an indicator of the amount of document editing and creation going on.
Please reply with your comments, I would love to hear them (especially if I have made a mistake).
Hello, is there a audit universe reference guide anywhere?
Hi Amarpreet, I once spoke with the Business Objects Auditing product manager and he explained that the XI 3.1 auditing universe (Activity.unv) was provided as an idea starter, not a solution. I think he regretted that it was ever included with BO. Therefore, I don’t think there is any universe guide available, unless someone outside of SAP BO wrote it.
Hi Julian,
I am required to extract the details of all the universes and their corresponding connections using Audit universe, Can you please help me with the objects which i need to use for this result.