Key Concepts

• A User is an individual who uses the LiveOps Dashboard. This User could be a Customer Support Agent, a Game Admin, or any other available role.
• When a User performs an action on the LiveOps Dashboard that needs to be logged, it is recorded as an Event.
• The Audit Log is a log of all Events performed by all Users.

Why an Audit Log?

The audit log is essentially a list of actions that have occurred and changes that have been made to the Game Server and the game entities (Players, Guilds, etc.). The log helps you to see what changes have been made to your game's systems, when and by whom. This information can help you to answer questions about how these systems got into their current states. You can also use it to monitor your data and to keep an eye out for any potential security breaches or misuse of information.

What Gets Logged?

We don't log every action that a User performs, only the ones that we consider to be interesting. Interesting events fall into two broad categories:

1. Changes to data. This includes changes made to a Player's data, such as renaming them or sending them an in-game mail, as well as changes made to the Game Server itself, such as putting it into maintenance mode. We consider all change events to be interesting and log them accordingly.
2. Viewing of information. This is a harder category to define because we are only interested when certain information is viewed - not all of it. For example, if a User views a list of players then that's not particularly interesting, but if they view detailed information about a specific player then that is an interesting event, and we log it. We also, for example, log when a User exports a Player's GDPR data dump.

Personal Data Collection

There's one thing that you need to be aware of with the audit logs: they collect personal data about the Users of your LiveOps Dashboard. For each User, there will be a record of what actions they performed and when, and the resulting events will be linked to their registered email address. We don't hide the information - it's clearly visible on the detailed Player view page for example - but you need to make sure that your Users are aware that this is being recorded. We also don't keep this data forever - under a default configuration, audit log events are purged from the database one year (365 days) after they are created. That also means that you won't be able to see audit log events that happened over a year ago.

Viewing Audit Logs

The main Audit Logs page is accessible from the LiveOps Dashboard's sidebar:

From here you can use the search feature to find events related to specific target types (eg: all Player events, or even all Player:0000000009 events), or to all events performed by a specific User, from a specific IP, a specific country, or a combination of the above.

The main page only shows an overview of each event, but you can click on any one to see more detailed information:

At the bottom of the detailed event view page, the "event payload" shows you more detailed information about the event. This data is specific to the event type being viewed and contains all relevant information about what happened.

TIP

Pro tip: We log the IP address that each action originated from and show it on the event details page. If you have Geolocation enabled, you’ll also see the country of origin. See Implementing Player IP Geolocation for how to do this.

You can also find the most recent events related to a specific player on that Player's overview page. This can be super useful for Customer Support Agents who are responding to support requests from players.

DANGER

For your eyes only: With Metaplay's default user roles and permissions, all users can see both the list of events related to an individual Player and the detailed information on a single event, but only Administrators are able to view and search through all events using the main Audit Logs page.

Extending the System

If you're a developer who is looking to add Audit Log events to your own features on the LiveOps Dashboard, check out the Working with the LiveOps Dashboard HTTP API guide.