Security & deployment
What is audit trail?
An audit trail is a timestamped, attributable record of important actions in a 3D printing operation, including submissions, approvals, configuration changes, prints, and failures.
Also known as: audit log, activity log, traceability
What makes a log an audit trail
Three properties, all required:
- Complete: actions cannot occur outside it. A log with a bypass is evidence of nothing.
- Attributable: every entry names an authenticated actor, not a shared account.
- Tamper-evident: entries cannot be edited or removed without that being detectable.
When it earns its keep
The audit trail is invisible until the day it is the only thing that matters:
- A research result has to be reproduced, and the exact print parameters and operator are in question.
- An export-control or ITAR review asks who had access to a specific design file.
- A finance review asks what the department actually consumed last quarter.
- Something was printed that should not have been, and the question is who approved it.
None of these can be reconstructed after the fact from a shared drive and a chat history.