Introducing Pervasive AuditMaster

Understanding Pervasive AuditMaster and Its Capabilities

This chapter provides an overview of Pervasive AuditMaster and its features. It is divided into the following sections:

n	What Is Pervasive AuditMaster?

n	Features of Pervasive AuditMaster

n	Pervasive AuditMaster Components

n	Where to Go Next

 

What Is Pervasive AuditMaster?

AuditMaster is a transaction intelligence and monitoring product for organizations that need to track access to and change in their mission-critical data. AuditMaster provides a detailed audit trail. For every transaction affecting your database, you can quickly identify the following things:

n	Who accessed a record or performed a change

n	What change has taken place

n	When the access or change occurred

n	Where the access or change originated

n	How the change was made

AuditMaster monitors databases, not client applications. It logs access to the database as well as changes made to data—including the reading of records, even if no change is made.

Figure 1-1 AuditMaster monitors the database, not its front-end applications.

AuditMaster creates a comprehensive audit trail. Every time a record changes, AuditMaster logs it both before and after the change, making it possible to recover from posting or data entry errors, because the log shows precisely who made what change when.

Features of Pervasive AuditMaster

To provide a secure audit trail, AuditMaster includes the following features:

n	A comprehensive logging system Captures the full range of events in your database and also stores database records before and after changes occur, whether from transactions by third-party applications or from direct changes to data

n	A query builder A graphical interface for customizing queries and tracking errors

n	Alerts Sends email to selected people or launches a selected application when defined events occur

n	Reports Details the who, what, when, where, and how behind every transaction in a report either displayed on-screen or for hardcopy printing

n	Archive manager Includes compression capability, for storage and retrieval of your historical information

Pervasive AuditMaster Components

The following table shows the three main software components that work together in AuditMaster.

 

Table 1-1

AuditMaster Components

Component	Description
Log event handler	Back-end component for monitoring and logging information about all database activity. The event handler runs on the database server at all times. The Log event handler is avaiable for both 32 and 64-bit platforms.
Data definition files	Schema information required by the AuditMaster Viewer client to interpret readable data fields in monitored database records and to enable alerts set to specific fields within a record
Viewer	Front-end user interface for querying, presenting, and reporting database events logged by AuditMaster

Where to Go Next

The following topics may be of interest:

n	To install the application, see Chapter 2: Preparing to Install Pervasive AuditMaster.

n	To learn about basic operations, see Chapter 4: AuditMaster Basics.

n	To find troubleshooting information, see Appendix A: Basic Troubleshooting.