Does Business Objects Auditor provide any impact analysis capabilities? In other words will Auditor allow me to report which universe object is used in which corporate documents?
Note:
I already know I can achieve this using VBA code to report against all my Business Objects documents without Auditor.
Andreas 
(BOB member since 2002-06-20)
Yes, if my memory is correct, only on reports that have been refreshed. In other words, you canât simply turn on Auditor today and run the report. You have to have been capturing audit statistics for (I suggest) at least a quarter prior to getting any real benefit out of some of the auditor reports.
The last time I did a serious review of Auditor there were some problems with the report. It didnât capture information from the âWhereâ clause, so any object used for a condition that was not also used in a result set would not appear. Thatâs just one example. 
Dave Rathbun 
(BOB member since 2002-06-06)
Actually the Auditor Impact-Analysis features run directly against the BOE repository for the Universe-Report linkage information, it doesnât require any active usage auditing history to be collected. Impact Analysis can be performed on reports before they have been run.
-S.
snagoski 
(BOB member since 2004-12-13)
That may be true for the current XI product line, but I donât think that the same thing was true for prior versions.
Dave Rathbun (BOB member since 2002-06-06)
No actually the reverse is true. The âAuditorâ product - collection of universes and reports, has yet to be released on the XI product line, just the server-framework and database for Auditing.
On the v5 and e6 product lines, the auditor product definitely includes the Impact Analysis of which reports use which objects from which universes, through several reports out of the full list of 44. Some of these reports pull directly from the Repository, and some have results from both the Repository and the audit access history.
From the Auditor User & Admin guides, 4 reports that have this info in different ways:
âObjects Used in Reportsâ (Repo and Audit history)
Average number of objects for each type of document.
List of objects contained in each document, with the total number of objects.
The 20 most and least frequently used objects for each type of document. Objects are listed in order of rank.
âImpact Analysisâ (Purely from Repository)
Number of documents in each universe.
Number of objects in each document.
A list of all the objects used in each document.
How many documents do I have in each universe? And Which documents (already in use) are impacted if I modify this universe?
âObjects Accessedâ (Repo and Audit History)
A list of all objects used in the universe, showing the documents they appeared in and the number of times the object was
accessed.
âUniverse Information Summaryâ - (Repository and Audit History)
⌠among a lot of other infoâŚ
For each universe, a list of documents classified by document domain. For each document:
ÂDocument name and type
ÂDocument category and size (in KB)
ÂCreation date
Top-level information on the Auditor product is at
snagoski (BOB member since 2004-12-13)
Youâre going to have to explain to me how it pulls out which objects are used in which reports when that information is not stored in the repository 
Yes, I know thatâs what it says but if you look at the actual report to see what it actually does I believe that youâll find a different story. The last time I did a serious analysis for a client was for version 5. Since the repository tables have not changed substantially in version 6 I would have to believe that the same things I found then are still true.
I will have to try to dig up the report I wrote for the client with some actual SQL code that is used in the various Auditor reports. But the main issue is that without actually opening a full client report, there is no way to reveal the number and type and name of objects used. That information just isnât stored in a queryable fashion in the repository at this time.
If someone can post some of the SQL code used in the Auditor reports and prove me wrong, I will happily eat my words.
Dave Rathbun (BOB member since 2002-06-06)
A quicky - I thought Impact Analysis used the BO V6.x server to actively trawl the documents in the repository, opening them and storing info - much the same as the scripts posted here on bob for doing hte same in V5.x
philmorris 
(BOB member since 2002-11-12)
A little follow up on this, the Impact Analysis doesnât seem to pick up all documents, and there doesnât seem any good way to make it do so.
I raised with BO support, and was told âyou must USE the document for it to be analysedâ.
I never got an answer on what âuseâ means and having tried virtually everything that could be considered useâŚ
philmorris (BOB member since 2002-11-12)
Phil,
I would venture to say âuseâ would mean opening the report in âmodifyâ, or even more so opening and saving (re-saving) while in modify mode.
Another point to consider is when you go into the CMC and click on Servers, you must go through each of your active servers and mark inside the metrics items you want Auditor to record. Unfortunately this is a hunt-and-peck that you will have to try setting over a period of several days (or even weeks depending on your system usage) to get this to your liking. Asking Auditor to record too much will bog down your system, and not telling it to record something will leave you empty, i.e. unable to do further analysis⌠Wouldnât it be nice if the Auditor guide explained how a metric tick in the CMC relates to the production of a report, hmmâŚ
Thanks,
John
jsanzone (BOB member since 2006-09-12)
Thanks John,
We tried that - seems an obvious definition of âuseâ but not according to IA. 
I wasnât very specific in my follow up post - I was referring to 6.5 Impact Analysis. Hopefully they sorted this out in the XI infrastructure.
Agree it would be nice if the auditor features were bought together in one page somewhere - must remember to see if this is the case in 3.0âŚ
philmorris (BOB member since 2002-11-12)
Andres/Dave-
I know this is an old thread but I went looking for Auditor information and this popped up.
Does anyone have a way to capture this information from the Auditor database? Iâm able to fumble my way through the universe, as cumbersome as it may be, but havenât yet found a way to capture
Is there an elegant way to do this?
Edit: BO Xi R3, SP5
Tito (BOB member since 2012-04-04)