Audit Logging Best Practices?

[Bob Pinna <bp...@marketvoyce.com>]

We're evaluating log4net for both general purpose logging and for managing
an audit log that will be visible to non-technical users.  We have a need to
log three types of audit events:

 

*	Success - Operation completed successfully
*	Soft Failure - Operation failed but will be retried
*	Hard Failure - Operation permanently failed and will not be retried.

 

We think we understand how to implement this within the log4net framework,
but since this seems like a common problem I thought we would post to see if
there are any best practices.

 

Our current thoughts are to:

 

*	Add three custom levels: Success, SoftFail, HardFail just above
Error in priority.
*	Log audit messages within the context of other debugging messages
via the "standard" root appender model.
*	Add a separate "audit message only" appender that filters out events
below the audit message priority to create a log suitable for display
(possibly after massaging) to customers.

 

Thoughts?

 

Best,

Bob Pinna

http://www.marketvoyce.com <http://www.marketvoyce.com/>