How do I navigate the audit logs in SharePoint 2019? #M365AMA

In this episode, the #M365AMA panel discusses the following community question:

“Our organization switched from SharePoint 2013 to 2019 a couple of months ago. As a site collection admin I noticed immediately that the audit log feature doesn’t work as it used to. It is surprisingly difficult to find any information about this. Anyway there are two big issues. First it seems 2019 does not log aspx file interactions any more, so it is not possible any more to detect who has viewed a page. This creates a big problem, as we need to know sometimes who exactly has or has not read information on a page. Another issue is that it seems there is no way to view the audit log of one single file. In 2013 I just opened file’s properties and clicked audit button and it listed all user interactions with that file. Now I can use the site collection level audit log to filter the activity of a single particular user, and I can see the log of a whole document library, but seems there is no way to get the log of 1 particular file for the past year, which was super easy in 2013. I think the only solution seems to be that for every important file I have to create a document library and then there is only this 1 file in that library, so the library log = file log. Maybe I’m not the only one with this problem and perhaps any ideas, is it possible to improve the audit log feature or I just don’t understand how to get this information in 2019?”

Check out the discussion here:

 

Participating in this discussion were:

• Christian Buckley @buckleyplanet 
• Shari Oswald  @shortcutshari
• Sharon Weaver  @sharoneweaver

Some relevant notes/links shared by the team:

• Per Sharon, Excel Online and macros don’t like each other. Don’t do it. Maybe consider a SPO and Power Automate solution instead!
• Per Shari, you can store them there, but they need to be opened in the app, not the web. Default the setting to open in app on the library.