Viewing the audit log for changes

Fastpath: Admin Center > Account > Audit log

The audit log shows various changes in your Zendesk since the account was created. It saves a record of these changes indefinitely, and you can view the entire change history.

You can view the audit log in Support, in Admin Center, or via the Support API. The log entries are the same in Support and Admin Center, but some of the interface features vary, like pagination, exporting, and setting date ranges.

This article contains the following sections:

• About audit log changes
• Viewing the audit log in Support
• Viewing the audit log in Admin Center

About audit log changes

Specifically, the audit log shows the following changes.

Account changes

• Account status
• Account billing cycle
• Account plan type
• Maximum number of agents for your account
• Subdomain name

User changes

• Agent and administrator creation and deletion
• Successful agent sign in
• Agent email address addition and deletion
• Agent added or deleted from group
• Agent role
• Agent and administrator password
• Group created
• Group deleted
• Organization deleted
• User suspensions

App changes

• App installation, removal, settings modification, and activation
• App creation

Business rules

• Automation creation, deletion, modification, and activation
• Macro creation, deletion, modification, and activation
• Trigger creation, deletion, modification, and activation
• View creation, deletion, modification, and activation
• SLA policy creation, deletion

Tickets

• Ticket deletion

Settings

• API access settings changes
• Email archiving settings
• Global password policy
• IP Restriction setting changes
• Password policy changes
• Social media channel activation and deactivation
• Allowlist and blocklist additions, modifications, and deletions

Information in the audit log includes:

Column	Description
Time	Time and date the event occurred
Actor	User who caused the event
IP address	IP address of the user who caused the event
Item	Object changed by the actor
Type	Type of action for the event (Created, Updated, Deleted, or Sign in)
Activity	Details about the event

Viewing the audit log in Support

You can view the audit log in Support.

You can also view the audit log in Admin Center. The log entries are the same in Support and Admin Center, but some of the interface features vary, like pagination, exporting, and setting date ranges.

To view the audit log from Support

1. Click the Admin icon () in the sidebar, then select Settings > Account.
2. Click the Audit Log tab.
3. View the information in the audit log.
4. Click any linked item to filter the audit log based on that item.

   For example, if you click a user in the Actor column, you see all events where that user is the Actor.

   To see all events again, click Show all results.

   

Viewing the audit log in Admin Center

When you view the audit log in Admin Center, the entries are the same as in Support, but you have some additional features that aren't available in the Support interface. For example, you can set a date range for the log entries you want to view and you can export log entries in CSV format.

To view the audit log in Admin Center

1. In any product, click the Zendesk Products icon () in the top bar, then select Admin Center.
2. Click the Account icon () in the left sidebar, then click Audit log.
3. View the information in the audit log.
4. Click the Time column to sort the entries by date.
5. To filter the entries, click Filter, click Start date and End date to set a date range or enter a name in the Actor field to filter by the people or system responsible for the activities, and then click Apply filters.

   By default, the filter date range is set to the last 12 weeks.

   

6. To email yourself a copy of the audit log in CSV format, click Email CSV. If you filtered the list before clicking Email CSV, the file is also filtered this way.

   When the export is complete, the email is sent to your primary Zendesk email address.

Personal information in the audit log

Administrators have the ability to permanently delete users, which removes the user from the system. This might be necessary because of General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) or similar regulations, which grant individuals from certain regions the right to erasure or the right to be forgotten or deleted. When permanently deleting users and removing personally identifiable information (PII) from Zendesk products, you must consider whether the data captured in the audit log contains personal information that also needs to be removed.

This may be necessary, but it is important to understand that altering the audit log in this way can make it harder to accurately track your history.

To delete PII from the audit log

1. In any product, click the Zendesk Products icon () in the top bar, then select Admin Center.
2. Click the Account icon () in the left sidebar, then click Audit log.
3. In the page description, click Privacy settings.
4. Select Automatically delete PII and click Save.

   When this setting is enabled, personal information in the actor, IP address, and item columns of the audit log is deleted automatically when a user is permanently deleted. Names are replaced with user IDs.