Configure auditing in Unified Service Desk

Agent auditing helps organizations to analyze agent productivity, identify gaps in process, provide coaching/training and further improve the customer service experience. Audit data in Unified Service Desk is written to the Microsoft Dynamics CRM server in a separate worker thread to ensure that during the time when the audit data is captured and written to the server, the client application is responsive to user requests. When you close the Unified Service Desk client, the application domain terminates all the worker threads first, and then it terminates the main thread. Auditing is not designed to be a real-time feature. Therefore, if the Unified Service Desk client fails, audit information is likely to be lost.

You can configure auditing in Unified Service Desk in two ways:

  • Standard auditing by adding auditing flag and setting its value to 1 in the Options area.

  • Custom auditing by using the Audit action for the Global Manager hosted control to log an audit entry of your choice.

In This Topic

Standard auditing

Custom auditing

Standard auditing

  1. Sign in to Microsoft Dynamics CRM.

  2. Go to Settings > Unified Service Desk. (How do I get there?)

  3. Choose Options.

  4. On the Options page, click New.

  5. On the New Option page, type an audit flag name in the Name field and appropriate value in the Value field.

    Add an audit flag in Unified Service Desk

    You can use the following audit flags:

    Audit flag Description

    AuditCacheMaxSize

    When this flag value is set to 1, the number of audit records cached before saving on to the server is 1 record.

    This option works only if the AuditNoCache is False.

    AuditFlagAction

    When this flag value is set to 1, audit records are created whenever an action is fired.

    AuditFlagAgentState

    When this flag value is set to 1, audit files are created when the status of the agent changes.

    AuditFlagHostedApplication

    When this flag value is set to 1, audit files are created when a hosted application is started or gets the focus.

    AuditFlagLogin

    When this flag value is set to 1, audit records are created when an agent logs in.

    AuditFlagSession

    When this flag value is set to 1, audit records are created when a session is created or there is a session switch.

    AuditFlagWorkflow

    When this flag value is set to 1, audit records are created when a UII workflow is started or closed.

    AuditNoCache

    If this is set to True, the audit records are saved dynamically to the server without any caching.

  6. Click Save.

Custom auditing

You can use the Audit action for the Global Manager hosted control to create special audit entries at various points within your application, which can be instrumental in reporting on agent usability and interactions. To do so:

  1. Sign in to Microsoft Dynamics CRM.

  2. Go to Settings > Unified Service Desk. (How do I get there?)

  3. Choose Hosted Controls.

  4. On the hosted controls page, click the name of your Global Manager hosted control in the Name column to open it for editing.

  5. On the nav bar, click the down-arrow next to the Global Manager hosted control name, and then click UII Actions.

  6. Search for the Audit action, and click the name under the Name column to open it for editing.

  7. On the nav bar, click the down arrow next to Audit action, and select Action Calls.

    Add an action call for an audit action

  8. Click Add New Action Call.

  9. On the New Action Call page, create an action call with the following parameters:

    Parameter Description

    Name

    The audit entry name. You must add this value under the Options area as an option name with value set to 1 to enable auditing.

    Action

    String representing the action that is being audited. Optional.

    TargetApplication

    String representing the target application for the audit. Optional.

    CustomerId

    String representing the customer ID. Optional.

    ContextId

    String representing the context ID. Optional.

    ApplicationId

    GUID of the hosted control for the auditing. Optional.

    AgentState

    String representing the agent state. Optional.

    ActionData

    This is the data to write out to the audit entry. If this parameter isn’t explicitly provided, it will use all the remainder lines in the Data Parameter of the UII action.

  10. Click Save.

See Also

Other Resources

Administer and manage Unified Service Desk
MSDN: Manage Options for Unified Service Desk
MSDN: Global Manager (Hosted Control)

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