What the Confluence Cloud audit log records — and what it does not

Guide · Checked against Atlassian's documentation on 14 October 2026

If an auditor asks who changed a policy page, who moved it to another space, or who deleted it, the Confluence audit log is the first place most admins look. For those three questions it is usually the wrong place.

What it records

Atlassian's audit log documentation lists these categories of events: spaces, users and groups, global administration, permissions, public links, content, and templates — and notes that the list is not exhaustive. In practice it is a record of how the site is configured and who has access to what.

What it does not record

The same page says so directly:

“The audit log doesn’t record information related to content edits (you can view this in the version history)” — and it excludes changes to a content’s location.

That leaves three gaps that matter in an audit:

Edits. Each page's version history shows its edits, but only page by page, and only while the page exists.
Moves. A policy moved from one space to another changes who can see it. The audit log does not record the move.
Deletions with their context. Once a page is purged from the trash, its version history goes with it.

Retention and plans

Events are kept for one year by default; an admin can shorten that to as little as 31 days.
The audit log is not available on the Free plan.

Filling the gap

There are three honest options. You can rely on version history and accept that moves and purged pages are invisible. You can build an Automation rule that comments on a page when it moves — workable for one space, hard to keep complete across a site. Or you can install an app that listens to Confluence's content events and keeps its own record.

Two limits you should know before relying on any tool of this kind:

It can only record from the moment it is installed. History from before that was never sent to it.
Confluence does not send an event for each page when a whole space is deleted. A tool can only infer those deletions from the space record — a careful one labels them as an inference.