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This is a new question that came from this question: Tracking Address Changes - 10+ Years

In the SF documentation it states:

Objects—Almost every object in the user interface is also an object in the API (for example, Account or Case). The API also has several objects that you can’t use in the user interface.

Which makes complete sense, but they mention this in the Event Monitoring documentation: https://trailhead.salesforce.com/en/modules/event_monitoring/units/event_monitoring_intro

Are they implying that changes to objects are recorded in event monitoring under the event type API? If so... I'm not seeing them or not seeing them in any detail that is.

The available data is non-object specific. It just tells me something was logged with an event type of API, not that the Contact object was updated or the address field was updated.

I just want to make sure I'm not missing anything here with event monitoring that could make tracking field changes easier.

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If you see the same trailhead as you have mentioned, it defines Events as:

Event monitoring is one of many tools that Salesforce provides to help keep your data secure. It lets you see the granular details of user activity in your organization. We refer to these user activities as events.

As I understand and with the information available on the documentation, this signifies that event logs captures any activity by a User viz., accessing a record, editing a record, etc., but not necessarily anything on the record data itself as what was changed vs. what not. You will still need to rely on your audit history to be able to track any change on data.

Further, for your question:

Are they implying that changes to objects are recorded in event monitoring under the event type API? If so... I'm not seeing them or not seeing them in any detail that is.

The answer is Yes. The "user activity" as accessing the record does get captured but it does not capture which "fields" on the record was changed. The event type API captures any Web Services API interaction per its definition:

API events contain details about your organization’s Web Services API activity.

Taking a quick look at all available event types, there definitely does not look any support for any field level interactions.

And if you download an event log file, you will get to see all the details as captured in the file but not exactly the details you need as part of audit trail. The event log file definition mentions that it captures operational events, whereas any change on the record where values are changing are necessarily transactional in nature.

The event monitoring product gathers information about your Salesforce org’s operational events, which you can use to analyze usage trends and user behavior.

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  • Thanks, between you clearing some things up here and re-reading the TrailHead docs, it doesn't seem like event monitoring will address my requirement because 1. As you said, field-level interactions are not supported, 2. Even if they were, it seems the event logs are can only be captured in intervals of 1-30 days when you are setting up the analytics app.
    – S.B.
    May 17, 2018 at 13:06
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    That’s right. I would think the event log to exponentially grow and impact platform performance if it had to maintain field history changes.
    – Jayant Das
    May 17, 2018 at 13:12

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