Installing and configuring the audit plugins

Liferay's audit functionality is composed of two parts: a back-end piece that hooks into Liferay events, and a front-end piece that gives you an interface to see what's happening. Both of these are available as EE-only plugins in the Customer Portal or Liferay Marketplace, and you'll need to install both in order to get audit functionality working (plugins installation is covered in chapter 9).

Once installed, there are two properties in your portal-ext.properties file which you can use to tweak the settings.

com.liferay.portal.servlet.filters.audit.AuditFilter: By default, this is set to false, because the audit plugins aren't installed by default. When you set it to true, the audit hook is able to capture more information about events, such as the client host and the client's IP address.

audit.message.com.liferay.portal.model.Layout.VIEW: In the code, pages are layouts. Setting this to true, therefore, records audit events for page views. It's turned off by default because this may be too fine-grained for most installations.

Once you've decided if you're going to use one or both of the two settings above, place them in your portal-ext.properties file and restart your Liferay server. Once it comes up, audit events are captured by Liferay, and you'll be able to use them to see what's happening in your portal.