Audit Logs: Enhancing transparency and security in Chatwoot

Whether you're managing a small crew or looking after a big organization, keeping an eye on who's doing what, when, and where makes a real difference. It helps things run smoothly, promotes transparency, and even comes in handy when legal stuff comes up.

We recently rolled out something exciting in Chatwoot to help keep things crystal clear – Audit Logs. If you've ever wanted to trace back activities in your Chatwoot account, this will cover you up. Audit Logs work noiseless in the background by recording every activity happening within your Chatwoot account – user activities, data modification, account-wide changes, and much more.

What can Chatwoot's Audit Logs do?

It's as simple as it gets. Whenever anyone takes an action in your Chatwoot account, like changing their availability status or updating a Webhook, the Audit Log makes a quick note. Each activity is noted within three headers:

1. Activity
   The 'Activity' column shows which user performed a specific action in easy-to-understand language. It displays the user's name or email ID. Likewise, it records the specifics of the action taken, such as the ID of a newly created or deleted inbox.
   
   See the full list of activities covered here.
   
2. Time
   The ‘Time’ column shows the full date and the precise time when the associated activity happened.
   
3. IP Address
   The ‘IP Address’ column shows the location where the action happened. This can help you track down the exact application, device, or system. An IP address can usually give you info about the city, ZIP code, ISP area code, and even the ISP's name.

This is available in our enterprise plans, which you can subscribe to. You will be able to access your account’s Audit Logs under Settings → Audit Logs.

This is a great way to ensure your customer support operations in Chatwoot are both secure and hassle-free when it comes to managing data.

Why should you care about Audit Logs?

If you find any of the following points relatable, you’ll find Audit Logs extremely useful.

Account security

Audit logs, like a CCTV camera, keep track of actions and add an extra layer of defense against unauthorized access.

Monitoring support ops/Chatwoot account

Audit Logs provides account admins all the information they typically need to ensure a smoothly running account. You can always review the logs to understand the backstage of your customer support operations.

Auditing teams

Reviewing actions in the audit log helps in getting insights into your team's performance trends, identifying areas of excellence and opportunities for improvement. By understanding these patterns, you can pinpoint training requirements and craft tailored development strategies.

Fostering accountability

The ability to associate actions to specific teammates promotes a culture of responsibility and ownership within teams. This also helps improve efficiency and quality of work. Transparent operations also imbibe trust within the team, and with customers. Audit logs maintain this transparency by providing the necessary insights and eliminating uncertainties and miscommunications.

Meeting industry compliance standards

If you're in a fancy industry affected by regulations like SOC 2, CIS, or any other (aren't we all?), audit logs are a useful armor to meet benchmarks conveniently.

Simplifying investigations

Audit logs maintain details of historical events. You can easily investigate an incident by tracing its timeline and learning about the associated entities. In the unfortunate event of breaches, disputes, or discrepancies, audit logs provide an invaluable resource for conducting thorough investigations and making informed conclusions.

Improving workflows and policies

By understanding the patterns emerging through Audit logs, you can find opportunities for improving your customer support operations. These insights can even extend to improving organization-wide policies and practices affecting both workflows and employees.

Cheaper to maintain

Maintaining your own audit logs requires management effort and storage costs. Chatwoot does both for you in a seamless experience.

Optimizing the Audit Logs within Chatwoot

If you are already using a central log management platform like MS Azure, Google Cloud, Datadog, etc., we recommend using an API to connect Chatwoot audit logs with them to create a centralized search and analysis platform for yourself.

Audit Log experience in the making

The Audit Logs is currently in its beta phase. That means there are even better things coming up. 🥳 Here’s a quick peek into what our team is working on to improve this feature further:

• Finding specific entries with the search bar.
• Filtering entries by tags, timings, user names/IDs, etc.
• Tracking more activities with a wider coverage like customer interactions.
• Seamless integrations with your existing auditing platforms or HR software.
• More detailed descriptions of the associated activities
• Exporting the file to a system.
• Adding a member of the team as a log-viewer, without giving them complete admin rights.

Would you like any specific activities tracked in Audit Logs? Hit us up in the live chat!