M-Files Event Log - Dashboarding and Reporting

Thank you bright-ideas.dk and Joonas Linkola - I'm still curious of 2 things: 

Where does the event log get saved to? How do I determine this? Is it possible to have the event log save to a master table, which could then be filtered into a dashboard. Can you save the event logs to M-Files itself?

I recently met Michael Schweitzer, CEO of Gravity Union. He demonstrated their dashboard where their event log can be mined for various events to determine compliance flags. Events such as a project consultant accessing records outside of their project, or downloading items right before their departure - these anomalies can be addressed since they're identified through this kind of reporting. 

Essentially I feel I'm not leveraging my event log and as Bright-Ideas pointed out, it's being over-written. 

Has anyone taken their event log to the next level?

Thank you bright-ideas.dk and Joonas Linkola - I'm still curious of 2 things: 

Where does the event log get saved to? How do I determine this? Is it possible to have the event log save to a master table, which could then be filtered into a dashboard. Can you save the event logs to M-Files itself?

I recently met Michael Schweitzer, CEO of Gravity Union. He demonstrated their dashboard where their event log can be mined for various events to determine compliance flags. Events such as a project consultant accessing records outside of their project, or downloading items right before their departure - these anomalies can be addressed since they're identified through this kind of reporting. 

Essentially I feel I'm not leveraging my event log and as Bright-Ideas pointed out, it's being over-written. 

Has anyone taken their event log to the next level?

It is possible to periodically export the event log using the Compliance Kit.  I haven't ever used it myself.  It looks like it goes to disk, which you'd then pull into SQL Server.  I feel like tagging Joonas Linkola would be good here (he can recall everything; I'm very envious).  That would then give you the ability to mine the resulting database and produce whatever metrics you need.

That said, I will add a small word of caution.

The event log contains a lot of potentially sensitive data.  If you are going down this route then ensure that you've thought about what sort of content may be in there and who may have access to it, even through any resulting aggregated format.

By default the event log is stored in the vault database.

• To ensure that the event log keeps all the events and doesn't overwrite older ones, you need to enable Advanced Logging in the vault. See "The Electronic Signatures and Advanced Logging module" in the user guide: https://www.m-files.com/user-guide/latest/eng/Event_log.html
• To export events from the vault database for external analytics and monitoring, you can use the Log Exporter module of Compliance Kit. It writes the logs to disk as XML files and you would then have to come up with a way to utilize those files (e.g. importing to SQL Server and analyzing with some third-party tool). As Craig said, you should be careful about the access to the exported logs.

Both Advanced Logging and Log Exporter come with the Electronic Signatures add-on package, so please check if your license already includes that.

Note also that the September '22 Update brought new event log filtering options to M-Files Admin, so even without these additional modules it's now easier to browse the event log if you are looking for instance events from a specific user (assuming the events are still in the log and not yet overwritten, that is):