Viewing AEM Audit Log without ACS CommonsViewing AEM Audit Log without ACS Commons

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AEM Audit Log is a convenient way to check who modified what and when within AEM pages or assets.

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ACS Commons provides an Audit Log Search tool which allows users to do an AEM Audit Log search and see what properties of a page (and enclosed components) have been altered.

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But what if you don’t have access to ACS Commons in your Production environment or it doesn’t work as expected (see Pic. 1 below), but you still need to know what has been changed on a particular page? This article will show you how to find out in two steps:

Adobe Experience Manager audit log search page showing error message about unable to search audit logs.
Pic. 1. An unknown error occurred in the Audit Log Search tool.

Step #1. Navigate to audit log events in CRXDE.

AEM Audit Log entries for pages are located under the:

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/var/audit/com.day.cq.wcm.core.page

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folder in the repository. An example for project ‘acme’ and page ‘testpage’ is in Pic. 2 below.

CRXDE Lite interface showing testpage directory and properties including cq:category, path, and cq:properties link.
Pic. 2. Audit logs for a test page inside ‘acme’ project’.

Log entries can also be found and sorted by date using the following SQL2 query (works in AEM 6.4 and older; AEM 6.5 returns an empty result set).

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SELECT * FROM [cq:AuditEvent] AS comp WHERE ISDESCENDANTNODE(comp, '/var/audit/com.day.cq.wcm.core.page/content/acme/country/us/en/testpage') order by comp.[cq:time]

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Step #2. Deserialize a binary with modified properties.

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An AEM Audit Log entry contains information on what exactly was modified in a page and its enclosed components. A set of modified properties can be retrieved from the ‘cq:properties’ field.

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We need to click the ‘view’ link (in the purple oval in Pic. 2 above), download the binary, and run the following Java program:

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public class ChangedProps {
    public static void main(String[] args) throws Exception {
        File file = new File("C:UsersdenisDownloadscq_properties");
        InputStream is = new FileInputStream(file);
        ObjectInputStream ois = new ObjectInputStream(is);
        ois.readInt();
        while (ois.available() != -1) {
            try {
                Object obj = ois.readObject();
                if (obj instanceof HashSet) { //we found a hash set with modified properties
                    Set<string> propertiesSet = (Set<string>) obj;
                    for (String property : propertiesSet) {
                        System.out.println(property);
                    }
                    break; //no need to parse the rest
                }
            } catch (Exception e) {
                e.printStackTrace();
            }
        }
        is.close();
    }
}
</string></string>

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The code is based on Audit Log Search Servlet from ACS Commons, so the program will print a list of modified properties similar to the console:

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jcr:content/parsys/testComponent/cq:lastRolledoutBy
jcr:content/parsys/testComponent/description
jcr:content/parsys/testComponent/jcr:lastModified

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Now we know which particular properties were modified and captured as an AEM Audit Log Event!

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Author: Denis Glushkov

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