Audit vs History

[Rakesh16i]

Hi,

I would like to understand what is the difference between Auditing and History.

According to below link, it is being said that "By default, the system only tracks changes to the incident, change, and problem tables." But I can see all the changes that are applied to CI attributes also visible from History.

Auditing and history sets

And I couldn't get what extra information can be captured when we set auditing to true from 'System Definition-> Dictionary' for required fields.

Regards,

Rakesh

[corina]

Hello Rakesh.

here is the difference between the two, in the article you mentioned:

he Audit [sys_audit], History Sets [sys_history_set], and History [sys_history_line] tables store the same data, but they serve different purposes and manage data differently.

The Audit [sys_audit] table is where the system stores historical information for all records. These records are intended to be kept forever so that administrators can always track the history of audited records. As the number of auditing records grows over time it becomes more and more inefficient to directly query the Audit table for historical information. It is much more efficient to run queries only on the smaller subset records you actually want to view historical information for.

The History Set [sys_history_set] table identifies which particular records from an audited table have historical information. The History [sys_history_line] table stores the actual changes to field values that occurred. The system automatically generates History Set and History records as needed from the Audit table when a user either creates a record or requests its history. Rather than containing a complete history of all changes in the system, History Set and History records only contain a recent subset of historical information for records where users have created or requested such information.

If you do not have auditing enabled, you cannot see the changes someone made to the record. This is when you go to the header, click right, show history then select list or calendar. You will see only the last update, which is not really useful in many situations.

[Keith Little]

I know this is a really old thread, but it was still very helpful today in 2024.

[divya mishra]

Hey Rakesh,

Audit also holds the data of when and by whom data was deleted and all the vital information.

Where as history will not be able to capture when the data was deleted as it will not be available after deletion.

Please Hit ✅Correct, ��Helpful, or ��Like depending on the impact of the response

Have a lovely day ahead

Regards,

Divya Mishra

[Rakesh16i]

Thanks for the responses Divya and Corina.

So can I say that even though audting is not enabled specifically, the updates data will still be available under history for all the CIs except the deleted records?

Regards,

Rakesh