Audit trail
Also known as: Audit log, Event log, Transaction history
An audit trail is a chronological record that documents the sequence of activities, changes, and transactions within a system or process. It provides evidence of who performed an action, what was modified, when it occurred, and often the original value before the change. This allows auditors to reconstruct events to verify compliance, ensure data integrity, or investigate security incidents.
In practice
An auditor may request system logs for a specific timeframe to verify that only authorized administrators modified user permissions in a production environment. They then trace these changes back to approved change-request tickets to ensure every modification was formally authorized.