An audit trail is like a digital paper trail that keeps track of every action and change made within an application. It's like having a detailed log of everything that happens, enabling you to trace back and see who did what, when, and why. This is crucial for security, compliance, and troubleshooting purposes.
For example, let's say you have an e-commerce website. The audit trail would keep a record of every customer order, every change made to the application, and every login attempt. If a customer reports an issue with their order, you can use the audit trail to see exactly what happened and if the application was changed.
Explore related concepts
Logging
Logging is the process of recording events, actions, or messages that occur within an application, typically for troubleshooting or analysis purposes.
Observability
Observability is the ability to understand how your application is working and behaving in production through telemetry data (logs, metrics, traces, wide events, etc.). It enables you detect, diagnose and resolve issues in your app before they impact your users and become problems.
Distributed Tracing
Distributed Tracing is a method for tracking the flow of requests through your application. It enables you to follow the journey of a request as it travels across multiple services, so you can see where things might be going wrong.