Changelog?

[Amy_Goldfine]

I just started at a new company and am working on implementing best practices for Marketo. At my old job, we had a changelog that we had to use every time we changed an existing Program, Smart Campaign, or Smart List. Now that Marketo has Audit Trail, is this practice redundant? I'm curious to hear your thoughts.

[Devraj_Grewal]

Amy,

Definitely would do away with the manual recording in the change log since Audit Trail can replace this practice. Perhaps become familiar with audit trail before you abandon the manual change log entirely, though, since audit trail does have some limitations (ex. audit trail can only store 6 months of data and you cannot navigate directly from Marketing Activities: ​).

[Amy_Goldfine]

What other limitations do you think Audit Trail has? I am not super familiar with it (mostly because at my last job, I was the only person who was changing things in Marketo).

[Devraj_Grewal]

Here are a few other ideas for enhancements to audit trail, they mostly concern navigation of the audit trail or features that should be recorded as activities in the audit trail:

[David_Gaible · Accepted solution]

Hi Amy Connor​,

Congrats on the new gig. I'll second Devraj Grewal​'s recommendation to check out Audit Trail - it is super useful. Even with the launch of Audit Trail I've still maintained a change tracking document for programs that deal with our Marketo architecture - Lifecycle Processing, Scoring, etc. Documenting these programs are key, and as a side benefit, you've always got the documents ready for onboarding new team members or quick references for leadership.

[Amy_Goldfine]

Oh interesting. That could be a good happy medium!

[Amy_Goldfine]

I've decided to enforce a changelog for architecture changes or anything related to our trial flow experience. I think it will be useful to have them all in one place for reference. I'll use audit trail for everything else. Thanks everyone for your feedback!