Auditing Report Downloads

Accolade Admin users can keep a record of which Accolade reports have been downloaded by which user and when, allowing administrators to maintain records of employee data download activities and clarify if and when data concerning users is being downloaded.

This functionality is available only to a limited number of individuals, namely those given the role of Auditor. This role is typically combined with the Administrator role. Once this role is assigned to a user, they are able to navigate to the Auditing page, listed under the System > Diagnostics section in Accolade, and download a .csv file containing details about which reports were downloaded by whom and when.

Note:  For the Auditor be able to view the downloaded data, they will need the appropriate additional access rights (e.g., Read-Only role with Access rights to the appropriate Access Group). The Auditor role cannot be combined with a Restricted User.

To assign this role to a user, see Assigning User Roles and Rights.

The set of items for which audit data is recorded in this log:

• Online Reports (global and project specific), including previewing and downloading to Microsoft Excel.

• Microsoft Excel template-based reports (global and project specific).

• Reporting via Accolade Office Extensions, including refreshing ad-hoc reports stored locally.

• Project Documents, including Deliverable and Activity versions, and related documents.

• Reference Tables

• Templates from the Template Library

• Queries

The action of downloading an audit of report downloads is also recorded, so when a subsequent audit happens, there will be a record of previous audits as well. Additionally, contents of the audit reports are recorded by Accolade to ensure that the data downloaded cannot then be deleted off Accolade.

Audit data is only available within a limited time frame. This is set up via the Number of Days to Retain Audit Data parameter, which can be configured in the Accolade Admin Console. Audit data outside this parameter's time window is deleted. By default, the parameter is set to 365 days.

To download an audit of report downloads:

Important! Users must have the user role Auditor to do this.

1. Navigate to System > Diagnostics > Auditing.

2. Click on the Download File button. A .csv file is downloaded.

   This auditlog.csv file contains:

   Field	Description
   UTCTimestamp	The time at which the download from Accolade was carried out in Coordinated Universal Time (UTC). Returned in YYYY-MM-DD hh:mm:ss format. For example, 2023-10-30 13:26:25.
   UserId	The User Id of the Accolade user who initiated the download. For example, 44.
   UserName	The User Name of the Accolade user who initiated the download. For example, Brenda Majors.
   UserLogin	The User Login of the Accolade user who initiated the download. For example, ACME\brenda.majors, or brenda.majors@acme.com.
   ProjectID	The System Project Id of a project for which a Project Level report, or a project document, has been downloaded. For example, 12.
   ProjectName	The Project Name of a project for which a Project Level report, or a project document, has been downloaded. For example, Beta.
   ReportID	The Id of a downloaded report. For example, 12.
   ReportName	The Name of a downloaded report. For example, Project Overview.
   ReportSystemName	The System Name of a downloaded report. For example, Prj_Overview_Rpt.
   QueryId	The Id of a query which has been executed. For example, 205.
   QueryName	The Name of a query which has been executed. For example, Users Overview.
   RequestMethod	The method type used for the download request. For example, GET.
   RequestURL	A partial URL which specifies the download request. For example, /Process/Reporting/PreviewHTMLReport?reportid=1&projectid=12.
   FileName	The File Name involved in the download. This could be a report or template name, or a generated file name. For example, AllProjects.xlsx or 81193768-2904-4d9e-a6d5-4b5639ad59f8.json. Note that the filename “AuditLog.csv” refers to the audit log itself. Entries with this filename show which users downloaded the Audit Log.
   FileLink	A hyperlink which allows the Auditor to see which data was downloaded. For reports, this is a copy of the data which was downloaded (including ad-hoc reports which were later discarded). For project documents, this is a link to the downloaded document (e.g., a deliverable or activity version, a related document, etc.).
   IPAddress	The IP address of the user downloading the report. For example, 10.3.45.107.
   UserAgent	The User Agent of the user downloading the report. For example, Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 10.0; Win64; x64) AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/118.0.0.0 Safari/537.36 Edg/118.0.2088.76, or PostmanRuntime/7.34.0.