Change History - Publishing to Kinesis

An audit of all administrative and configuration updates made through the Symbee Connect Administration Portal can be viewed from the Change History screen within the portal. See here for further details. Change history activity is only kept for up to 45 days within your Portal, and then automatically removed.

The steps below enable publishing of your change history to an Amazon Kinesis stream within your AWS account, to allow you to perform any custom handling of the data should you have security and compliance needs that require access to your change history for longer than the 45 days.

The steps below walk you through downloading and running the Symbee Connect Audit History CloudFormation, which creates an Amazon Kinesis Stream in your account (and associated permissions to allow data to be published to that stream), and then configuring the sending of your audit activity to Kinesis from your Symbee Connect Administration Portal.

Custom handling of your data could be as simple as adding an Amazon Kinesis Firehose to the created stream, and storing your data in an S3 bucket of your choice, or something more complex such as attaching a custom Lambda to the Stream to reformat and send the data to a third-party (or in-house) auditing solution.

Run the CloudFormation

If this is the first Symbee Connect CloudFormation you have run, you will need to run the Integrations CloudFormation first. For step by step instructions and further information about CloudFormations click here.


Download and Install the Audit History CloudFormation

  1. Log into the Symbee Connect Administration Portal.

  2. If you have more than one Environment configured within your Company in Symbee Connect, on the top Navigation bar, ensure you select the appropriate Environment you wish to configure for Audit History streaming before downloading any CloudFormation script.

  3. Then click on the main Function menu in the top navigation bar, and click on Feature Integrations (CloudFormations) in the Company Environment Configuration section.

  4. From the Feature Integrations (AWS CloudFormations) page, scroll down and locate the Audit History CloudFormation and click the download link to download.

  5. You will be prompted with a Save As dialog screen.

  6. Save the AuditHistoryCloudFormation.yaml file locally to your PC for use in the following steps.

  7. Log Into your AWS Management Console.

  8. Make sure you are in the correct AWS region for where you want to deploy (this can be found on the top right of the Navigation bar).

  9. Click on Services at the top, and under Management and Governance, choose CloudFormation.

  10. From the CloudFormations console, select Stacks in the left-hand navigation bar, and select Create Stack (with new resources (standard)) (button is in the top right of the screen).

  11. You will be presented the Create Stack view for creating/deploying a new CloudFormation script (known as a stack):

    • Under the Prepare Template section, select Template is Ready
    • Under Specify Template, select Upload a template file
    • Under Upload a template file, click Choose File
    • In the resulting file selector, find and upload the file you saved from Step 6 above
    • Click Next at the bottom

  12. On the next Specify stack details page:

    • Give your stack an appropriate name - for example: symbee- yourenvironment -audithistory or similar
    • Click on Next

  13. On the Configure Stack options, keep all the defaults, and click Next at the bottom

  14. On the Review page, scroll to the bottom, check the blue "I acknowledge that AWS CloudFormation might create IAM resources" check box, and click the Submit button at the bottom to complete

The stack will take a minute or two to run. Click the refresh button to see progress, until deployment is complete.

Enable sending your Audit Activity to Kinesis

Once the Audit History CloudFormation has been deployed, follow these steps to turn on sending of your audit activity to you Kinesis Stream.

  1. Log into the Symbee Connect Administration Portal.
  2. If you have more than one Environment configured within your Company in Symbee Connect, make sure you have the appropriate one selected. This can be found on the Navigation bar to the left of the Function menu.
  3. Select Symbee Connect Integration from the main Function menu in the top navigation bar under Company Environment Configuration.
  4. From the Symbee Connect Integration screen, expand the Audit Configuration section
  5. Set the Audit Events Kinesis Region setting to the name of the AWS Region you deployed your CloudFormation into. For example, for US Virginia, you would set to: us-east-1
  6. Check the Send Audit Activity to Kinesis checkbox to enable.
  7. Click Save (top right).

Once these steps are complete, any new audit activity created will be delivered to the Amazon Kinesis stream in your AWS account. See the Change/Audit History Event format section for the format of the Kinesis events.