Best practices for audit trails

In production environments it is recommended using a separate database for audit trails beside the default ImageMaster database. This is often desired to comply with the principle of separation of duties, so the audit trail can be managed by a dedicated system administrator.

In case of the database type “Microsoft SQL Server”, if you intend to use and obtain a license for the audit trail feature, you must set up two separate databases (one as the default and the other one as the audit trail database).

  • Both databases have to be set up exactly in the same manner according to the installation guides. So for the audit trail database you use the same scripts for data model creation that are used for the standard database:

  • Optionally, if this is desired for strict security reasons:

    • You can limit the access to this audit trail database instance for ImageMaster to CREATE and INSERT statements.

      It is recommended keeping an access that is not limited for a later upgrade scenario:

    • By design an audit trail only adds new entries.

    • ImageMaster does not modify content or alter this audit trail database instance during normal operations, so it does not need any permissions for ALTER, DELETE or UPDATE statements.

    • However, during an ImageMaster upgrade more permissions could be required to also upgrade this database model.

The dedicated connection parameters for this audit trail database are set in the configuration step: Configure datasources (connection to database).