News

"Robot" Based Events are No Longer Recorded in the Audit Event Log

December 6, 2022

Mark Servilla

Description

As of 23 November 2022, the EDI data repository no longer registers "robot"-based events in the Audit "event log" database table. This planned omission aims to reduce the growth of the "event log" table, recover disk storage (from about 30 million records), and improve query performance. Not registering robot events will also affect the tallies counted in the "resource reads" table. From an end-user’s perspective, the "total reads" returned in the Audit Manager's docid and packageid REST API read methods use the data stored in the "resource reads" table to return the number of "read" (download) events for either a data package series or a specific data package revision. The "total reads" value includes the sum of both robot and non-robot read events. With this change, the "total reads" value for a data package will now only increase if a non-robot event occurs (along with the "non-robot reads" value). We do not plan to remove the "total reads" value from this REST API method at this time due to concerns about breaking backward compatibility. However, we believe that the more important value is that of the "non-robot reads" - the value of user downloads.

Note, we define "robot based events" according to the COUNTER Code of Practice for Research Data in Repositories.