Track Data Changes

As an administrator, you can track (audit) the data changes made to any planning model. SAP Analytics Cloud logs all changes to the transaction data of that model when users publish data from private versions to public versions.

Who does this apply to?

  • Users with any of these permissions for Data Change Log: Read or Delete.

  • Users with any of these standard application roles: Admin or BI Admin.

Data Changes

The Data Changes page shows changes to the transaction data in any model that has data auditing enabled. The audit data is logged when data is published from a private version. All changed cells in the published version will be audited. The audit information for each changed cell includes the following:

  • Date and time of the change

  • User who made the change

  • Original value

  • New value

Some common uses for the data tracking information include:

  • Seeing who changed the planning data for a specific region.

  • Seeing when the planning data of a specific product was changed.

  • Seeing the history of budget data over a quarter.

Activate Data Auditing

Context

Data auditing is enabled at the model level.

Procedure

  1. Open the model you want to track data changes for.
  2. From the tool bar, choose (Model Settings).
  3. On the Access and Privacy tab, switch on Data Audit.
  4. Select OK.

Viewing the Data Change Log

Context

To display the log, you'll need to have the Read permission on the Data Change Log for the appropriate model.

Note that a data change log has up to 2^31 (i.e. 2,147,384,648, or ~2 billion) records. When the data change log reaches its size limit, publishing data will fail and you will see the following message:

Publish cannot be performed because the data audit table has reached the maximum number of rows.

To avoid this issue, consider periodically downloading log entries as a backup before deleting them.

Procedure

  1. From the side navigation, choose Security Start of the navigation path Next navigation step End of the navigation path Data Changes.
  2. From the Select Model list at the upper left corner of the screen, choose a model.
    If the list is long, you can start typing a search string to find your model. If your model doesn't appear in the list yet, choose Select New Model to find the model.

    If your model contains multiple measures (key figures), the data columns are grouped by measure.

  3. To choose which columns appear on the Data Changes page, click (Select Columns).
  4. If you want to filter the data, select (Filter) to show the filter bar, and then select to create a filter.

    For example, to display the data for a specific date range only, select Audit Time.

    Or, you can filter the data by selecting one of the column names, and then choosing members from the dialog.

Downloading Data Changes

Context

When the size of the data change log reaches the specified threshold, some users will receive in-app notifications, email notifications, or both. Further notifications will be sent if the log continues to reach the size threshold. For more information about the data change log notifications and their recipients, see Configure Data Change Log Notifications.

To reduce the size of the data change log, you can first download part or all of the data change log for a model as CSV files, and then delete those log entries from the system. You'll need to have the Read and Delete permissions on the Data Change Log for the appropriate model.

You can also download audit data using the Data Export Service API. For more information, check out the dedicated documentation in the SAP Analytics Cloud REST API Developer Guide.

Procedure

  1. From the side navigation, choose Security Start of the navigation path Next navigation step End of the navigation path Data Changes.
  2. From the Select Model list at the upper left corner of the screen, choose a model.
    If the list is long, you can start typing a search string to find your model. If your model doesn't appear in the list yet, choose Select New Model to find the model.

    If your model contains multiple measures (key figures), the data columns are grouped by measure.

  3. Choose (Download options).
  4. In the Download Data Changes dialog, type a file name for the download in the Name field.
  5. Select a Starting Date, an End Date and choose Download.
    The rows within the dates that you specified are downloaded as CSV files with up to 75,000 rows each.

Deleting Data Changes

Context

You can delete data audit logs to reduce the size of the data change logs.

Procedure

  1. From the side navigation, choose Security Start of the navigation path Next navigation step End of the navigation path Data Changes.
  2. From the Select Model list at the upper left corner of the screen, choose a model.
    If the list is long, you can start typing a search string to find your model. If your model doesn't appear in the list yet, choose Select New Model to find the model.

    If your model contains multiple measures (key figures), the data columns are grouped by measure.

  3. To delete data changes for the model, choose (Delete Data Changes) icon.
  4. In the Delete Data Changes dialog, choose Add Filter and select from the list of dimensions of the model, as well as Audit Time and Audit User, to set a filter on.

    • When the Delete Data Changes dialog is displayed, filters you set for viewing the data change log will be inherited. You can select to edit these filters.

    • To specify the time range, you can set a filter on Audit Time. After the Set Filter for Audit Time dialog appears, choose Custom Time Range, select a Starting Date, an End Date, and choose Set.

  5. Choose Delete.

Results

The application will notify you once the deletion process is complete.