Auditing and logging
Auditing entails both pre-production and post-production tasks.
This topic includes the following information:
Go-live assessment (GLA)
Pre-production auditing involves an extensive go-live assessment of the Production environment before the customer's production cutover. Any change made to a default system parameter during onboarding must be documented in a Request for Change (RFC) document for both QA and Production environment promotion requests. The BMC SaaS Operations team allows some flexibility with adjusting system parameters but reserves the right to keep them within reasonable values or value ranges. The threshold values allowed for each parameter are assessed and mitigated where necessary.
IMPORTANT
The go-live assessment is performed by the BMC SaaS Operations team after the system is promoted to the production environment and before the official go-live event.
The Onboarding Project Manager is responsible to ensure the Partner, Professional Services, or customer logs a support case with the appropriate go-live assessment details within Support Central at least two weeks before the scheduled go-live date. Please block off seven business days to allow for any remediation identified as a result of your go-live assessment audit, which should be accounted for within your onboarding project timeline.
Standard checks performed during the go-live assessment:
- Application and SaaS database resource validation
- Environment assessment of your environment's monitoring and sizing
- Optimization of your application and infrastructure configurations, including your server group ranking
- Common indexes are added to your database for stable performance
- RLS is applied to standard forms for your BMC Helix ITSM Smart IT, and other service management applications
- Checks for your email engine service, AR email mailbox configuration and FTS
- The go-live assessment is concluded with an environment rolling restart
The go-live assessment can typically take up to 4-6 hours to complete, depending on the complexity of your BMC Helix deployment.
Additional checks related to license compliance that are made prior to production cutover include:
- environments are configured with the proper license capacity
- users are configured at or below the purchased license capacity
- the license configuration form is inaccessible to anyone other than BMC SaaS Operations
- users are not configured under multiple licensing models
Issues with any of the above may delay production readiness and should be mitigated as early as possible in the onboarding project.
User activity logs
| Log Type | Definition | Controls |
|---|---|---|
| Workflow Audit Logs | Workflow Audit Logs are records of significant events that occur within a software application and are used to track and monitor activity (E.g. updating a ticket status, reassignment of tickets, changing field content), including which end-users did what and when. Common requests include:
| BMC Helix ITSM customers can enable this logging directly within the application and control the retention policy. When enabled, the application will write audit logs to the Helix ITSM database. |
| SaaS Service Logs | SaaS Service Logs are logs generated by various system components or services that make up a software application for your BMC Helix ITSM environment(s). Service logs provide information about the operation and performance of those services, and can be used to troubleshoot problems, optimize performance, and identify potential security threats. | If you require certain application log data for your environment, review options and submit a case to the BMC Support Team. It is recommended to only activate logging for a short period of time as this can create an enormous amount of data that consumes your allocated BMC Helix ITSM storage. SaaS Service Logs are made available to customers upon request and are provided via the File transfer process. |
| Security Related Audit Logs | BMC stores security related event logs in our Security Information and Event Management (SIEM) system, including auditable events for BMC SaaS operating systems, applications, databases, and infrastructure. | Security Related Audit Logs include sensitive and confidential data, used for the purpose of internal BMC audits and in compliance with your BMC SaaS agreement. Planned changes or security related event will be communicated per the BMC Helix Notification Policy and in accordance with policies outlined in the SaaS Trust Center. |
BMC reserves the right to limit the duration of active logging. You should include your specific use case when requesting log activation so that BMC can help you determine an appropriate recording period.
Comments
There is a typo. Managed tile transfer process. TILE, should be FILE ?
Thanks Hock. Yes, this should be "file". I will update when I publish other edits on this page.
There is an error with User Logs Link update to User log
Thank you, Sandrine for the comment. I have updated the link.
Regards,
Dhanya
Please provide more details when the generated logs will be deleted again.
Please provide more details when the generated logs will be deleted again.
Hello Andreas,
Thank you for your comment.
For the Workflow Audit Logs in the Controls column, you can clearly see that the retention policy is controlled by the customers.
For the SaaS Service logs, I would need to check with our internal teams. Which applications are you thinking of? For example, ITSM, Digital Workplace, Helix Virtual Agent, etc.? It'll likely be different for each application.
We don't have this information documented today but we'll take it up as an improvement. However, we need time to track the retention down for each product.
Thanks,
Dhanya
Thanks Dhanya I was thinking about all applications.
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