Enable Auditing for SharePoint Online & SharePoint 2013 On-Premise

Auditing in SharePoint Online and SharePoint 2013 On-Premise

SharePoint Online/On-Premise has built-in audit feature that enable us to track administrative activities.

With SharePoint auditing, we can monitor site collection level administration such as permission changes, role updates, group membership changes and changes to the audit policy itself.

There are few areas of SharePoint administration which can't be audited, such as; farm administrator assignments, site collection creation and other farm level operations.

For SharePoint auditing, we have to use “Audit log reports” settings from Site Collection Settings. Both, SharePoint Online (Office 365) and SharePoint On-Premise have different options for auditing settings.

Steps to configure Auditing in SharePoint:
1. Navigate to Site Settings of Root level site.
2. Click "Audit log reports" under "Site Collection Administration" section.
3. Configure the Auditing according to the requirements.

1. Following image shows audit settings that are available in SharePoint Online (Office 365).

2. Following image shows audit settings that are available in SharePoint 2013 On-Premise.

FAQs

1. Can we increase duration of storage for SharePoint audit reports?
For SharePoint auditing, it provides report based logs that can be utilize to see overall all usage of sites, documents, lists, etc.

To see audit log, first we have to select location (SharePoint list) where we want to save our audit log report.

If we are using Office 365, then storage limit is based on our storage quota for Office 365 tenant. If we are using On-Premise version, then storage quota is based on storage capacity of our server.

Storage limit is also based on list, maximum items it can handle. We can also set document retain settings after which audit report will be deleted.

2.  Can we move and save SharePoint audit logs to another location?

Audit logs are saved to list as excel file and we can download that file to check the report. We can move this audit log files as we desire and this way we can save/move logs.

3.  Can we increase SharePoint audit log details?

We cannot change logging details for auditing, but we can use audit settings where it provides some items that can be included/removed from audit log report.

If you have any questions you can reach out our SharePoint Consulting team here.