Introducing AuditMaster
Understanding AuditMaster and Its Capabilities
The following topics provide an overview of AuditMaster and its features.
•
What Is AuditMaster?
•
Features of AuditMaster
•
AuditMaster Components
•
Where to Go Next
What Is AuditMaster?
AuditMaster is a transaction monitoring product for organizations that need to track access to, and changes in, their mission-critical data. It provides a detailed audit trail. For every transaction affecting your database, you can quickly identify the following things:
•
Who accessed a record or performed a change
•
What change has taken place
•
When the access or change occurred
•
Where the access or change originated
•
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.
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 and when.
Features of AuditMaster
To provide a secure audit trail, AuditMaster includes the following features:
•
A comprehensive logging system
Captures the full range of events in your database and stores database records before and after changes occur, whether the transactions originate from third-party applications or from direct changes to data
•
A query builder
A graphical interface for customizing queries and tracking errors
•
Alerts
Sends email to selected people or launches a selected application when a defined event occurs
•
Reports
Details the who, what, when, where, and how behind every transaction in a report both for displaying on-screen or for hardcopy printing
•
Archive manager
Includes compression capability, for storage and retrieval of your historical information
AuditMaster Components
The following table shows the three main software components that work together in AuditMaster.
 
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 available 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:
•
To install the application, see Preparing to Install AuditMaster.
•
To learn about basic operations, see AuditMaster Basics.
•
To find troubleshooting information, see Basic Troubleshooting.