Track User Activities

As an administrator, you can track the activities that users perform on business objects such as models, stories, and other files, track changes to users and roles, and more.

Who does this apply to?

  • Users with any of these permissions for Activity Log: Read or Delete.
  • Users with any of these standard application roles: Admin or BI Admin.

Activities

SAP Analytics Cloud logs all activities users perform on business objects. Any changes related to permissions or access control, and any access to your data, is tracked; for example:

  • Model changes
  • Story views
  • Changes to a file's sharing settings
  • User changes or creation
  • Role changes or assignments
  • Team changes
  • Data locking state changes
  • Changes on calendar events
  • and more

You may want to track user activities either for data access history, or for looking at security changes on the system. Some common uses for the tracking information:

  • See who viewed a certain story or dashboard with private company information.
  • See who updated a dashboard before a presentation.
  • See who logged into the system.
  • See who added a user and gave them Admin rights.

In addition, SAP Analytics Cloud can log failed attempts to create, delete, and change objects in the following situations:

  • Missing authorization
  • Disallowed or invalid change

If a user activity isn't currently being tracked, and you believe this activity should be tracked for audit compliance reasons, you (or your system administrator/owner) can submit a support ticket at support.sap.comInformation published on SAP site. Or, any user can click the help icon in SAP Analytics Cloud, and send feedback using the Send Feedback or Submit Ideas buttons.

Viewing Activity Log Data

Context

To display the log, you'll need to have the Read permission on Activity Log.

Procedure

  1. From the side navigation, select Start of the navigation path Security Next navigation step  ActivitiesEnd of the navigation path.
  2. To filter for specific types of activities, select the (Filter) icon.

    In the Set Filters dialog, you can select one or more parameters to filter in the Available Filters list. In the Active Filters list, type or choose a filter value for each parameter that you select. When you select OK, the log is filtered according to your selections.

    If you apply filters to the log, the entries that you filter out are also excluded if you download the activity data.

Downloading and Deleting Activity Data

Context

When the size of the activity log approaches the limit, users who have the Delete permission for the Activity Log will receive an email and an alert notification. Further alerts will be sent if the log continues to grow closer to the limit.

When the activity log reaches its limit, final notifications are sent, and then the oldest rows will be deleted from the system to keep the log size below the limit.

To reduce the size of the log, you can first download part or all of the log as CSV files, and then delete those log entries from the system.

The default limit for the activity log is 500,000 rows. You can request that this number be changed to a higher number, or changed to a one-year rolling period, by entering a support ticket.

Procedure

  1. From the side navigation, select Start of the navigation path Security Next navigation step  ActivitiesEnd of the navigation path.
    You can also open the Activities page directly from the link in the notification email.
  2. If you want to filter the activities that you will download, select (Filter).
    Tip
    Filtering the activity log can be useful when collecting troubleshooting data, but is usually not necessary for archiving activity log data.

    In the Set Filters dialog, select the filters that you want to apply, and choose a value for each filter. Time Stamp filters will be overridden by your settings in the Download Activities dialog.

    To remove filters, select Reset to Initial Filters in the Set Filters dialog.

  3. Select (Download options).
  4. In the Download Activities dialog, type a file name for the download in the Name field.
  5. Select a Starting Date and an End Date, and select Download.
    The rows within the dates and filters that you specified are downloaded as CSV files with up to 75 000 rows each.
  6. To delete activity data, select the (Delete options) icon.
  7. In the Delete Activities dialog, select a Time period.
  8. If you choose Specific range, set a Starting Date and an End Date.
    It is recommended to delete the same range that you downloaded.
    Note
    Filters applied in the Activities page don't apply to the delete operation.
  9. Select Delete.
    All activity rows in the specified time period are deleted from the system.