topic Re: NPrinting Audit Logs in Qlik NPrinting

NPrinting Audit Logs

weijietc — Thu, 27 Jun 2019 04:36:00 GMT

Hi All,

Is there anyway to capture NPrinting Audit Logs as details as possible?

Audit Logs require what the users clicks or change in :

1. User login into NP Web Console

2. User login to newsstand

3. NPrinting Designer

Thanks.

Re: NPrinting Audit Logs

Ruggero_Piccoli — Thu, 27 Jun 2019 08:02:51 GMT

Hi,

All available Qlik NPrinting logs are described here: http://help.qlik.com/en-US/nprinting/June2019/Content/NPrinting/AdministeringQVNprinting/Logging.htm. There are no more log that the ones you can have by enabling the debug level.

At the moment, June 2019, there is not a specific feature to monitor users activities.

Best Regards,

Ruggero

Re: NPrinting Audit Logs

Andrew_Kruger — Thu, 12 Nov 2020 12:14:42 GMT

Please check out the Qlik NPrinting November 2020 release which contains an Audit Log capability that may help you. https://help.qlik.com/en-US/nprinting/November2020/Content/NPrinting/AdministeringQVNprinting/Audit-trail.htm

Re: NPrinting Audit Logs

Danijel — Fri, 13 Nov 2020 08:34:26 GMT

@Andrew_Kruger

Is it possible to load the logs directly into Qlik Sense (e.g. via the REST connector) or do the logs always have to be downloaded first?

Re: NPrinting Audit Logs

Ruggero_Piccoli — Fri, 13 Nov 2020 08:59:18 GMT

Hi,

You can upload the CSV in Qlik Sense via REST connector.

Best Regards,

Ruggero

Re: NPrinting Audit Logs

Danijel — Wed, 03 Feb 2021 16:28:08 GMT

Hi @Ruggero_Piccoli

does this mean that I always have to download the file manually before reading it back into Qlik Sense?

I would like a solution without this intermediate step. Meaning a direct connection from Qlik Sense to the audit trail of NPrinting.

That way I would have less effort and less sources of errors.

Greetings

Re: NPrinting Audit Logs

Lech_Miszkiewicz — Wed, 03 Feb 2021 22:31:31 GMT

Hi Danijel,

The unsupported method I am using is:

create PostgreSQL connection from QlikSense or QlikView using following setup:
- host: your NPrinting server - for it to work you will need to change config files of postgres to allow for postgres to listen not only on "localhost", I explained all this here: https://community.qlik.com/t5/Qlik-NPrinting-Discussions/How-to-connect-to-postgresql-database-from-another-server/m-p/1690593#M28517
- port: 4992
- user: postgres
- database : nprinting_audit
- password: your repository password

Once you create this you can SQL select the only table available there which contains audit logs. The way I work with it is that I run extract daily when no one is using it I store it to QVD file and each day i run incremental load to append data to it. This allows me to store historical audit too. Everything else in logs is self explanatory.

Things to remember:

timestamp is in UTC mode so you may need to convert it to your local time with Qlik function

NOTE: THIS IS NOT SUPPORTED METHOD SO YOU WILL BE DOING IT AT YOUR OWN RISK

on the other hand it works like a charm 🙂

Re: NPrinting Audit Logs

Ruggero_Piccoli — Thu, 04 Feb 2021 10:01:53 GMT

Hi,

You can connect to the Repository as suggested by @Lech_Miszkiewicz or, starting from next version February 2021, you can connect via API that is supported:

Audit data can be exported as JSON via API
Audit data can now be exported in JSON format due to new API audit/events.

Best Regards,

Ruggero

Re: NPrinting Audit Logs

Danijel — Thu, 04 Feb 2021 11:20:25 GMT

Hi @Ruggero_Piccoli

thanks for the info.

The version is not yet published 🙂

Regarding the suggestion of @Lech_Miszkiewicz . He writes that this is not supported, does that mean that in case of technical problems Qlik denies support?

As I understand it, the connection would be read-only?

Greetings

Re: NPrinting Audit Logs

Ruggero_Piccoli — Thu, 04 Feb 2021 11:28:17 GMT

Hi,

Yes, sorry, February 2021 is not yet published but it will be soon so I think you could evaluate to wait some days and implement an API based solution when available or follow the suggestion from @Lech_Miszkiewicz.

February 2021 is available as technical preview at https://community.qlik.com/t5/Technical-Preview-Discussions/Qlik-NPrinting-February-2021-Technical-Preview-is-now-available/m-p/1774185#M122 in case you want to test it in a sandbox (not in production).

I told this to you so you can make a better decision. I want to avoid that you invest time today to develop the SQL solution and after few days the API become available.

I hope this helps.

Best Regards,

Ruggero

Re: NPrinting Audit Logs

Danijel — Fri, 05 Feb 2021 13:39:15 GMT

Hello all,

thanks for the info. Then it would make sense to wait for the February version.

But here I have the problem that I have never worked with the APIs, just do not know how they are written and how to use them.

Is there maybe a beginner course somewhere? 🙂

Re: NPrinting Audit Logs

Lech_Miszkiewicz — Sat, 06 Feb 2021 00:43:15 GMT

@Danijel

I am working now on the blog post which will cover exactly this - stay tuned. In a day or 2 you will have working example.

cheers

Re: NPrinting Audit Logs

Lech_Miszkiewicz — Sat, 06 Feb 2021 10:41:48 GMT

I just put something together here: https://nprintingadventures.com/2021/02/06/nprinting-audit-logs/

hope it helps

Re: NPrinting Audit Logs

rafalcqlik — Wed, 26 May 2021 11:16:14 GMT

Hi @Lech_Miszkiewicz

I'm trying to use your Nprinting.qvs script to pull audit data from Nprinting. It's working fine but there is that 1000 rows limit so I tried to download data in a loop. I noticed that in NPrinting_Audit_Data table, there is that totalItems field which seems to contain number of records in audit table. So I used that in my loop so pretty much it looks like this (trimmed it a little bit):

set vQueryOffset = 0;
Do

NPrinting_Audit_Data:
SQL SELECT
"totalItems",
"offset",
"limit",
"__KEY_data",
(SELECT
"id" AS "id_u1",
"userId",
"userName",
.
.
.
FROM JSON (wrap off) "data" PK "__KEY_data"
WITH
CONNECTION( URL "$(vURL_Audit)", HTTPHEADER "cookie" "$(vCookie)", QUERY "Limit" "$(vQueryLimit)", QUERY "Offset" "$(vQueryOffset)", QUERY "dataType" "NewsstandReport");
;

let vTotalItems = peek('totalItems',-1,'NPrinting_Audit_Data');
let vQueryOffset = $(vQueryOffset)+$(vQueryLimit);

Loop until vQueryOffset >= vTotalItems

It works fine but I'm not getting all the records. For some reason I'm just getting records from yesterday (2021-05-25) and today (2021-05-26). And I know there are more because when I download log file using this URL: https://ServerName:4993/api/v1/audit/logs I can see records since 2021-05-21 (which is when I enabled audit in nprinting). What's wrong? How to build that CONNECTION string to get all records from db?

What's strange is when I add another parameter: QUERY "end" "2021-05-24T23:59:08Z" it gives me records from 2021-05-24 (still nothing from 2021-05-21 - 2021-05-23). I tried with "start" parameter and set it to 2021-05-01 but no change. Is there something like a default limit which returns just last 24h of data? Do I also need to add "start" and "end" parameters into my loop and fetch each day 1000 rows at a time and then go to next day?

I will try to build some extract to load that data incrementally and save into qvd but first I need to understand how that works...

@Ruggero_Piccoli maybe you will be able to help here as well?

Thanks!

Re: NPrinting Audit Logs

Ruggero_Piccoli — Wed, 26 May 2021 13:41:41 GMT

Hi,

I think it is something related with the app you are using because Qlik NPrinting pages every 50 rows https://help.qlik.com/en-US/nprinting/May2021/APIs/NP+API/index.html?page=9 and the limit of the CSV is 2^20-1 = 1,048,575.

Best Regards,

Ruggero

Re: NPrinting Audit Logs

rafalcqlik — Wed, 26 May 2021 16:10:19 GMT

Yeah, by default that limit is 50 but what @Lech_Miszkiewicz figured out is that we can increase that up to 1000 (above 1000 it gives an error) so I'm fetching 1000 records at one time, then increase offset by 1000. But it's worth a try to just read it in pages with 50 rows. I'll try that. Thx