Asset History

Asset History is the audit trail of au2mator Asset Management. Every time a tracked record is created or changed, au2mator writes down what changed, who changed it, and when – so you can answer questions like who moved this notebook to another location last month without digging through database backups.

TABLE OF CONTENTS

• Overview
• What Is Recorded
• What Is Not Recorded
• Change Sets
• Reading the Timeline
• Searching the History
• Permissions and Scope
• Related Articles

Overview

The history is shown per record. You open a Hardware Asset, a Location or any other tracked record and see its own timeline, newest entry first. There is no separate global history page – history always belongs to the record you are looking at.

Each timeline entry answers four questions:

• When the change happened.
• Who made it.
• Which properties changed.
• From which value to which value.

History entries are written automatically. There is nothing to switch on per record and nothing to maintain.

What Is Recorded

au2mator records changes for these 14 record types:

• Hardware Asset and Configuration Item
• Category, Model, Group
• Company, Country, Location, Room
• Cost Center
• User
• Status, Group Status, User Status

Translations of Country, Status, Group Status and User Status are recorded as well. They appear in the timeline of the record they belong to, with the culture shown next to the property.

Column changes on a Category – a column being added or removed, or its label, data type or required flag changing – appear in the Category timeline, because that is where the change is meaningful.

What Is Not Recorded

Some records are not covered by Asset History:

• Billing Rule, Billing Run, Billing Run Log and Charge Record
• View Configuration
• Group membership entries
• Warranty sync records

Billing Runs and Charge Records keep their own trail. A Run stores its own log of what happened while it ran, and a Charge Record records its own corrections – a price override is stored on the record together with who made it and why.

Changes to a Billing Rule are not part of Asset History either. A Rule decides what an Asset costs, so if you need to be able to answer who changed this amount and when, record that outside au2mator for now.

Change Sets

If you change three fields of an asset and press save once, that is one timeline entry with three changed properties – not three separate entries. au2mator groups everything written by a single save operation into a change set.

Record creation is marked separately. The first entry of a timeline says the record was created, and the properties listed beside it are the values it started with.

Reading the Timeline

Values are stored raw and resolved for display. Where a field points at another record, the timeline shows the name of that record rather than its internal id, so a location change reads as a location name and not as a identifier.

Some entries carry an extra label that explains what kind of change it was:

• a column joining or leaving a Category
• an item being added to or removed from a list
• the culture a changed translation belongs to

Searching the History

The history of a record can be searched. The search looks at property names, old and new values, and the name of the person who made the change.

A match on a single property still shows you the whole change set it belongs to. If you search for a location name, you also see which other fields were changed in the same save – which is usually the context you actually need.

Permissions and Scope

Viewing history requires its own permission. Having it does not override the Asset Manager Scope: a user restricted to a Company, Location, Room or Cost Center sees the history of their own records only. Asking for the history of a record outside that scope is refused.

History inherits the scope of the record, not of the user interface. Narrowing someone's scope narrows what they can look back at as well.

Related Articles

• Roles & Permissions – roles and the Asset Manager Scope.
• Hardware Asset – the record type most often reviewed.
• Category – where column changes are recorded.
• Billing Run – the separate trail billing keeps.