Data traceability
Calculating carbon emissions and tracking goals requires organizations to ensure there are no duplicates and redundancy of data. Microsoft Sustainability Manager provides built-in capabilities to handle the data uniqueness across activity, reference, and system data.
Microsoft Sustainability Manager provides organizations with the control to define uniformity of uniqueness for data records. We recommend that organizations define unique values in the optional origin correlation ID (OCID) field in the Microsoft Cloud for Sustainability data model entities wherever possible. This recommendation can help organizations trace their data from the external data sources to data ingested into Microsoft Sustainability Manager for auditing purposes.
The OCID is a unique identifier that organizations can use to correlate a record with its data origin, which can be helpful for auditing purposes. When they define unique values in the OCID field, organizations can ensure that their data is traceable and accurate.
Unique values in the OCID field have the following benefits:
- They can help identify and resolve data errors.
- They can help track the source of data changes.
- They can help comply with auditing requirements.
In addition to the OCID field, Sustainability Manager also provides primary keys to uniquely identify records. Primary keys are used to ensure that data isn't duplicated in a table, and they're also used to join tables together. For tables where OCID field isn't populated, Sustainability Manager defines a unique record key based on the record type specific Primary key evaluation rule.
Overall, defining unique values using OCID is a recommended practice that can help organizations to improve the accuracy and traceability of their sustainability data. Not defining OCID requires organizations to use a combination of record columns to determine uniqueness.