Not able to download audit reports

Auditing is an important feature in SharePoint. Auditing maintains a log of the actions performed on content in a site collection. Administrators can retrieve the entire history of actions — from a particular user or date range.

If you want to learn as how to configure audit settings then please refer the following article: http://office.microsoft.com/en-us/sharepoint-server-help/configure-audit-settings-for-a-site-collection-HA010099726.aspx

Coming back to the main point: One of our clients has raised a ticket with us by mentioning: They are not able to download ‘content viewing’ reports.

What exactly is happening as they are not able to download?

·         Open the SharePoint site on which you are working on

·         Site actions

·         Site settings

·         Site collection administration section

·         Audit log reports

·         Whenever we clicks on ‘content viewing report’ to download

·         It prompts for credentials

·         After entering the correct username and password, it keeps the login prompt as it is and finally ‘you are not authorized to view this page’

What is the reason behind this issue / proper explanation?

Audit settings can be configured at the site collection level only. The logs are maintained in the dbo.AuditData table of the respective content database.

You will find an excellent explanation here:

http://blogs.msdn.com/b/subhajitc/archive/2009/05/20/tip-the-untold-story-of-audit-logs-in-sharepoint.aspx

Resolution:

stsadm -o trimauditlog

   -url <URL name>

   -date <YYYYMMDD>

   -databasename <database name>

   [-databaseserver] <database server name>

Important instructions:

·         If you are providing the site collection URL then there is no need to provide database name as well as database server name

·         Let’s assume that your client wants the audit data in between 21 September 2011 to 25 April 2012 then the date parameter will be 20110921, so the data before this will be deleted or u can call it as trimmed.

Note: This operation is available after the Infrastructure Update for Microsoft Office Servers is installed. This functionality is available only by using Stsadm.

If you have any queries/questions regarding the above mentioned information then please let me know. I would be more than happy to help you as well as resolves your issuesJ J