What are Audit Logs in Dynamics 365 CE?

Audit logs in Dynamics 365 Customer Engagement (CE) provide a mechanism for tracking changes and user activity against supported Dataverse data and configuration.

They are particularly important for compliance, security investigations, troubleshooting, and accountability.

For example, if an opportunity's estimated revenue changes from ₹10 lakh to ₹15 lakh, auditing can help establish:

• Which record changed
• Which field changed
• Previous value
• New value
• Who performed the change
• When the change occurred

What can be audited?

Depending on the configuration and supported capabilities, organizations can audit areas such as:

• Record creation
• Record updates
• Record deletion
• Changes to selected fields
• User access/activity
• Security and configuration-related events

How it works

Auditing generally involves enabling auditing at the appropriate levels and selecting the tables/columns or activities that need to be tracked.

A common hierarchy is:

Environment/Organization → Table → Column

This allows organizations to control what should actually be audited instead of attempting to capture every possible activity.

Why audit design matters

Auditing everything can create unnecessary data volume and make investigation more difficult.

A better approach is to identify business-critical and compliance-sensitive data.

For example, an organization might prioritize auditing:

• Customer information
• Credit limits
• Opportunity values
• Case ownership
• Status changes
• Sensitive business fields
• Security-related configuration

Expert point

Audit data should not be confused with application logging.

Application logs help developers understand how an application behaved.

Audit logs provide evidence of who changed what and when, supporting governance, compliance, and accountability.

Organizations should also consider retention, storage, access permissions, compliance requirements, and monitoring strategy when designing auditing.