The built-in Octopus Deploy Audit feature is handy for seeing the history of specific changes - and who made them - to a single item. However it's not great if you have a lot of items (projects, deploy processes, machines, included variables sets, etc.) and a lot of history. Sometimes you need to find a change ("this was working last week!") and you don't know where it is (the project base settings? the project deploy process? the project variables? a variableset included with the project? the machine? the environment? some combination???) and you are in a bit of a rush ("PRODUCTION IS DOWN!"). We've all been there.
In this case the Audit tool is not going to work.
If you've had this problem, or you just want an easier way to see all the changes to your system over time, there's an easy solution: export your Octopus Deploy configuration often and diff the exports! Schedule a export to run every so often (once a day or week, once every few hours...?) and use your diff tool of choice to compare the export folders.
How easy is that? In seconds you can open up a diff to show you all the changes to your Octopus Deploy configuration over time.
If you configured the path to your diff viewer with Set-ODUConfigDiffViewer there's a handy shortcut for you: odudiff. If you run it with no parameters it opens up your diff viewer comparing the two most recent exports. However, if you supply a parameter to it (hours) it opens your diff viewer comparing the most recent export with the first export that is at least that many hours older than the latest export.
C:\> # opens your diff viewer comparing the two most recent exports (most recent on right-side, of course)
C:\> odudiff
C:\>
C:\> # opens diff of most recent export and first export that is 48 hours older than the most recent export
C:\> odudiff 48
C:\>
C:\> # opens diff of most recent export and first export that is 3 weeks older than the most recent export
C:\> odudiff (24 * 7 * 3)
C:\> # nice!If you have spent a lot of time reviewing Octopus Deploy configuration changes over time (as I have) this shortcut becomes super-handy!