Audit Trail & Activity History for Assets in Adobe Experience Manager (AEM)

We are currently using Adobe Experience Manager (AEM) as a core platform for managing and publishing imagery to our website. However, there are significant limitations around auditing and activity tracking, as there is no comprehensive audit trail available for us to utilise.

This creates challenges for operational processes, including complaint investigation, troubleshooting issues and understanding when and how changes have been made within the system.

Currently, key activities such as asset uploads, metadata updates and publishing to the live website cannot be tracked. Internally, we have identified multiple gaps where audit visibility is either limited or not available.

Use Case / Problem:

Without an audit trail, we are unable to:

• Identify when an image was changed or replaced on the website
• Trace who made specific metadata or asset updates
• Investigate discrepancies or bugs more efficiently, enabling us to respond to complaints with greater confidence and accuracy.
• Maintain a clear historical record of asset activity across product pages

This leads to increase manual investigation, reduced accountability and slower resolution times.

Requested Enhancements:

We would like AEM to provide a clear and accessibly audit history covering the following areas:

1. Asset Creation via Workfront Fusion

• Visibility of who uploaded an asset into AEM
• Details of the upload date and time
• Ability to trace source system (e.g. Workfront Projects)

2. Asset Modifications

• Full history of changes made to an asset
• Details of what was modified (e.g. metadata fields, tags, captions etc.), for both Adobe’s out-of-the-box functionality and any custom-developed features
• Date and time of each change
• User who made the change

3. Publication Tracking

• Record of when an asset was published to the website
• Identification of who triggered the publication
• Visibility of when assets were unpublished and archived

4. Product Level History

• Ability to view publication history at a product level
• Timeline of when assets were added, updated or removed.

Benefits:

Introducing auditing capabilities would deliver clear benefits such as:

• Faster and more accurate complaint investigations
• Improved troubleshooting and root cause analysis
• Greater visibility and accountability across teams
• Reduced reliance on manual tracking and workarounds
• Stronger governance of digital asset management processes