Using the Fusion Middleware Control Enterprise Manager, the last major configuration to set up auditing can be completed:
- Log in to Fusion Middleware Control Enterprise Manager.
- On the left-hand side pane, expand WebLogic Domain.
- Right-click on the bifoundation_domain option.
- Select Security | Audit Policy.
- Click on the row for BI Publisher Server to select it.
- Change the Audit Level drop-down value to Medium.
- Notice that the Enable Audit column will render several green check marks in place of the BI Publisher Server.
- Click on the Applybutton in the upper-right corner of the page.
- As you can see from the Information note at the top of this section, all changes made to this page require a server restart to take effect.
- Restart the WebLogic Server, which will first entail stopping all Oracle BI system components.
After Oracle BI 12c restarts, the configuration for auditing will now be in place for Oracle BI Publisher. All login, logout, and report access information will be captured and stored into a physical file on the server. This information could also be stored in a database schema that the RCU utility creates specifically for FMW auditing. To extend the auditing information for storage in a relational database, and not the filesystem, a few additional steps, including running the RCU utility again (remember you ran the RCU once before during the installation of Oracle BI 12c) are required.
Confirm that the WebLogic Server has been restarted. Start the Oracle BI system components and confirm that the /analytics application is available. You would normally check it when making the Oracle BI server available. To check if the log file is working properly, follow these steps:
- Log in to the /analytics server, for example,
http://<server_name>:<server_port>/analytics/. - Click on the Catalog link from the global header.
- Expand the folders
Shared Foldersand click on theBI Publisher Reportsfolder. - Click on the Open link for the Departmental Finance Report.
- Clicking on this link will open the report within the Oracle BI Analytics application and will trigger the audit log file to be created and begin retaining entries.
- On the Oracle BI server, locate the
audit.logfile in$BI_HOMEuser_ projectsdomainsbifoundation_domainserversbi_server1logs auditlogsxmlpserver. - Open the
audit.logfile to view the entries.
Viewing the audit.log file, you can see that one or more entries have been made based on your actions against the BI Publisher report. If you change the report display to HTML or PDF, another audit line will be registered in the file. You cannot delete the file while the WebLogic Server is running as it is locked for writing by the Java Virtual Machine (JVM) process that is controlling the auditing functionality. The audit log entries are somewhat cryptic, but still legible. You can clearly see the name of the user accessing the report, the report display type, timestamps, and so on. The next step, which is beyond the scope of this book, would be to configure the auditing and monitoring data to be placed into a database instead of the filesystem. A database audit repository would allow you to frontend some of this information and analyze its data with any other data.
Moving on, a few common questions have arisen with the new BI Publisher and Oracle BI embedded integration of 12c. Though not an exhaustive list, these few items warrant mention here.
You may have noticed that your session timed out while conducting the exercises in this chapter. If you didn't this time around, you will most likely experience this at some point while developing within Oracle BI Publisher 12c. The session timeout is actually not readily configurable for BI Publisher via any GUI as it is with Oracle BI Presentation services. The timeout for BI Publisher is set to 30 minutes, by default, with a warning around 15 minutes of inactivity. In order to change this, you will need to inflate/decompress the BI Publisher JEE Enterprise Archive (EAR) file deployed on the WebLogic Server. Then you will need to access the web.xml file and modify the session-timeout property to a higher value in order to increase the timeout period. From there you can recompile the inflated files back into the EAR file format and redeploy the application to the application server.