Why is auditing disabled on most of the Asset fields?

[davidmcdonald]

We've been stung in the past by changes to asset data being changed, and the change wasn't audited or added to the record's history.

By default, it looks like 61 of the 92 or so fields in the Asset Register (alm_*) tables have auditing disabled on them. At first I thought that maybe it was because many of the fields are shared with the CMDB CI tables which are audited, however what about assets which don't have a CI? There's also some non-audited fields that aren't shared with the CI tables, such as Acquisition Method.

I'd like to go through and enable auditing for those fields, but I thought I'd as first.

Does anyone know if there's a reason that auditing is disabled for most of the asset register fields?

[adilrathore]

By default, the ServiceNow auditing only tracks changes to the incident, change, and problem tables. For rest of the tables you have to either enable auditing for the table or the individual fields:

You can check the below link for details:

https://docs.servicenow.com/bundle/istanbul-servicenow-platform/page/administer/time/concept/audited...

[davidmcdonald]

I'm not quite sure about that page, it says that it doesn't track a few things, but in practice it does.

• It tracks changes whenever we use an Import Set, unless the "Run Business Rules" checkbox is unticked
• As mentioned before, there are some fields in the Asset tables which are audited, which are not part of the Incident, Problem, or Change tables.
• Catalog Requests, Projects, and Calls are also outside of Incident, Problem, and change, but changes to those tables are still audited

I get the feeling that article hasn't been maintained in a while.

[adilrathore]

It can be the case that there are some more fields enabled for auditing in the due course of future releases. But from the posts referred by dravvyramlochun we have a good explanation that there would be a potential performance impact of auditing fields that are frequently updated by automated processes like discovery, imports and so on.

[davidmcdonald]

Fair enough. It sounds like auditing is disabled for those fields to help prevent performance drops, but auditing is safe to be enabled if required.