Kontent Audit Log feature released

We are increasingly seeing Enterprise customers adopt microservices architectures and Content as a Service platforms such as Kontent. Largely this is due to the maturity and ease of adoption of best-of-breed SaaS services for many and varied requirements these organisations have, from CRM to marketing automation, commerce to content management. But putting products and features aside, there is typically an additional set of requirements enterprise-level users need to meet, such as Service Level Agreements (SLAs), data sovereignty, governance and compliance. 

The Audit Log module in Kontent might be tucked away in Settings and hidden from most users on most days, but when required, it's a very powerful feature for administrators to track precisely what was changed in the system and by whom.

Of course, Kontent has always had the ability to compare different versions of content created or edited by different users in a nice visual way, but this is different – the Audit Log allows you to drill down and track every last change to a single field in a content type, even if it's not currently in use on the site.

Say the marketing department raises the alarm that traffic has dropped off suddenly to certain key pages across multiple websites that are drawing content from your headless CMS roughly three weeks ago. There may have been countless content edits during that time, hundreds of pages published by tens of users, as well as multiple deployments of various features to one or more of those websites.

The Audit Log allows a user to instantly drill down by a date range, by action (create, restore, update, delete), across content types or snippets (reusable groups of fields across types) and see exactly what was changed, by whom, at exactly what date and time. You can determine immediately exactly what changed within the CMS, and quickly identify whether that was the root cause of the issue.

But the feature isn't just useful for this kind of auditing, it's super handy for developers and content modellers too!

Say you're working on a new feature or testing some changes with a team in a separate environment (great idea so you don't accidentally break your production apps and websites). You've been dutifully going about tracking and noting your changes, even writing cool migration scripts for the CLI so you can easily migrate your changes across environments later. But then you realise not everyone has been approaching it the same way, and some changes are accounted for, but some aren't. No problem – the audit log will give you a super neat and clear list of exactly what was added, changed, or removed, for that environment.

The Audit Log might not be the most gorgeous feature the Kontent team have produced, but it's a solid tool to add to the list of Enterprise features along with environments, collections, multi-factor authentication, choice of data centre locations, and many more.