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Order Status Audit Log

Records every order status change: what it was, what it became, who changed it, from where, when, and from which IP address.

"Why is this order marked complete?" is a question Magento cannot answer. The status history shows that a status changed, sometimes, and never says who did it or how. This module answers it.

What an entry looks like

In the order's Comments History:

One line, fixed field order, parseable with explode(' ') then explode('=', $part, 2). Values are stripped of whitespace, = and |, so nothing in a username or a header can forge an extra field.

cause=magento

Magento moves orders between statuses on its own — processing becomes complete once nothing is left to ship, and either becomes closed once nothing is left to refund. No caller asks for it.

Without distinguishing those, an audit trail tells you an admin set the order to complete when in fact they created a shipment and Magento drew the conclusion. That is the difference between an audit trail and a list of events.

Where entries are written

Two places, independently switchable, both on by default.

Order comments. Where admins already look. They are written inside the order's own database transaction, so an entry exists if and only if the change it describes was committed — and rolls back with a failed save. They are not visible to customers.

A table of its own, deployecommerce_order_status_audit. This is the copy that lasts:

• No foreign key on order_id, so entries survive order deletion. Order comments cascade away with the order; these do not.
• The actor is resolved to a name when the change happens, not looked up later, so entries survive the admin user being deleted too.
• Indexed on order, increment ID, actor, status and date, so "every change by this admin in March" is a query rather than a full scan of a text column.

Turning the table off leaves you with a trail that lasts exactly as long as the orders do. That is a reasonable choice for operational debugging and a poor one for compliance.

Configuration

Stores → Configuration → Advanced → Order Status Audit Log

Default scope only. Audit policy is a property of the installation; scoping it per store view would leave you unable to say which policy applied when an entry was written.

What is and is not recorded

Detection is handled by deployecommerce/module-order-status-transition, which covers everything that goes through a normal order save: the admin, mass actions, the API, shipments, invoices, refunds, payment webhooks, cron, the CLI, and the statuses Magento assigns itself.

It cannot see writes that bypass the model layer — raw SQL, and bulk import tools that write straight to the sales_order table. No event-based approach can. See that module's README.

Two related caveats worth knowing:

• Behind a CDN the recorded IP is only as trustworthy as Magento's trusted-proxy configuration. With none configured, Magento takes the first X-Forwarded-For value, which the client controls.
• Anything with database access can write rows that look like audit entries, including order import tools. The comment sink in particular shares a table with ordinary order comments.

Record both, and treat them as a strong account of what happened rather than as evidence.

Adding your own destination

A sink is a destination. It can filter, so it does not have to care about every change — here, one that alerts a channel when a parcel comes back:

Sinks run inside the order's save transaction. They may attach data to the order, which Magento persists as part of the same save; they must never call save() on it. A sink that throws is logged and skipped — losing one destination must not cost you the others, and an audit log must never break a checkout.

Development

Tests are written with Pest and need no Magento installation. Magento's own packages come from the public Mage-OS mirror, so no Adobe credentials are required.

Licence

MIT. See LICENSE.md.