We’re excited to share that you can now manage Auditing from the Azure portal and via PowerShell commands where previously, Auditing was introduced and available in the new Azure preview portal. Auditing tracks and logs all events that occur on your database, such as updates and queries against data.

As with the Azure preview portal, you can configure Auditing for your database with a few simple steps using an intuitive configuration interface in the Azure portal, shown below.

You need to start with a Basic, Standard or Premium database to set up Auditing.

Navigate to the target database in the Azure portal, and click on the Auditing & Security tab to launch the Auditing configuration tab.

Simply enable Auditing to surface the Auditing configuration options. Select an Azure Storage Account where you want your audit logs to be saved and simply specify the set of events that you wish to log.

Once you’ve configured the Auditing settings, you need to update existing client applications connecting to the database to use the Security Enabled Connection Strings. This will enable the database activity of these applications to be logged. Security Enabled Connection Strings have a slightly different format, and replace the previously used connection strings:

Once this step is complete, you are ready to go. The logs will be saved to the specified Storage account using Tables storage.

For those who prefer scripting for database management, you can now configure and manage Auditing using PowerShell. Every action taken on Auditing in the portal can also be done via PowerShell commands. The available Auditing cmdlets are as follows:

• Get the current auditing policy of a database
• Get the current auditing policy of a database server
• Set auditing policy for a database server
• Disable auditing on a specific database
• Disable auditing on a specific database server
• Set a specific database to use its server’s auditing policy

More information on Auditing:

• Getting started with Auditing
• Channel 9 video on Auditing

If you have’t signed up for access to the Auditing preview, please do so now! We’d love to hear any feedback you have on Auditing via the SQL Database forum.