Background

Water and wastewater plants are complex environments where not only are humans making active, dynamic changes, but the source water often can be variable to a point where there can be dozens of changing variables at one time.  Keeping track of who changed what, where and why is important to understand how systems run, as well as understanding “what happened” during an abnormal (or normal) event.


Consequently, most all actions in Waterly are audited, essentially creating a small entry of who changed what, where, and what was the data before they changed it.  We then expose this very detailed list to all parties that have authenticated access to the Waterly application.  


Accessing the Audit Log

The Waterly Audit log is accessed by clicking the Waterly logo in the upper-left corner, then clicking on the View Audit Log button, which will bring you to the Audit Log user interface.


User Interface

Waterly’s Audit interface has 5 filtering options:

  • Organization - Typically only used by larger, investor-owned, or contract operated customers who have many systems within their organization.

  • System - Refers to a specific water or wastewater (or other) system.

  • Event (Type) - There are a number of audit entry types that an Audit Log user can filter on.  The most common being “Data Point Changed” 

  • Users - This filter allows you to select one or more users associated with the systems and events you have selected.

  • Date Selection (with local time zone displayed) - Used to select the date or date range to filter the Time Saved to Waterly (the date/time the log entry was created)

You only need the Organization and a date/range selected to get data returned. The search occurs on change and not on button submit. 


TIP: Note that when you change filters, the URL (website address) updates.  Yes, this means you can save various filters as bookmarks or forward your filter to a co-worker!

Watch Live Events Mode

Turning “Watch Live events” to the ON (right) position will allow an audit log users to view audit events in near real-time.  The app will “lock” the filters you have selected and then display any new audit entry that is created once it is toggled on.  

NOTE: It may be beneficial to select the Clear Live Events button to clear the display of audit items.  Clicking this button will clear the screen; audit event records themselves cannot be deleted in Waterly.

For live mode, essentially, when a user saves any changes, they will show up on the top of the screen.  You can also include WaterlyConnect Events (see below) but doing so may have negative consequences if your organization has a lot of data coming into the app from WaterClick partners through the WaterlyConnect API.

 

Include WaterlyConnect Events Mode

A user can decide to include or NOT include “WaterlyConnect” events in the logs. By default, these event types are not shown. In most cases, WaterlyConnect data comes from various WaterClick Partners (most of it being SCADA data), and due to its automated and often nature, may consume a very large number of the  audit entries (all WaterlyConnect entries also create audit entries, but the User will say “WaterlyConnect” under the User heading.  See the example below that shows where the button is, as well as the User called “WaterlyConnect.”

Audit Results Table

The list of items that appears in the Audit table has four columns that correspond to the records in the audit log:

  • Time Saved to Waterly - Records the date and time and time zone of when the event of saving the data occurred in the local time of the source site. Note that the timestamp here is created when a Waterly user received the “Saved” notice in the app, which looks like this:

  • Type - The various types of events in the log correspond to the area in the app where the change was made.  You can filter these types by starting to type a word (like metric, or process, or user).

  • Event - The Event column is more of an Event Details column that stores lots of information about the event, including:

    • What Report Date (and/or time) was the change made for?  This should usually be the same as the (Date) and Time Saved to Waterly.  However, if users are “backdating” entries, you will see the first column will have a date different than the report date it was applied to.

    • The data hierarchy of where the change was made in Waterly.  You can click on the box with the arrow to open a new tab with that site.

    • Event Details - that list the old value, the new value, as well as many of the gory details of exactly what, where, when, and how the data change was committed to the Waterly database.  This information is usually used by system administrators to troubleshoot the details of the application.

  • User - This is the user who was logged in when the change was made.  You can hover over the entry if the name is truncated.