using log4J for auditing?

[Noah Davis <no...@yahoo.com>]

Still new to Log4J and I want to get an idea if it's
really the right tool for what I need. In some
respects it's spot on - I need to be able to log
exceptions at different priorities and categories. ok,
so far so good.

However, there's another requirement which is somewhat
different, and that's an auditing requirement.
Correctly or not, I consider auditing, at least of the
kind I need, to be a separate kind of activity than
exception logging for 2 reasons:

1. There is no priority concept for auditing. Or, if
you'd like, auditing is all of level "info" - but
there's no need to distinguish between one kind of
auditing and another in terms of priority.

2. At least in the system I'd be working with,
exceptions are just exceptions which don't differ much
as far as the information stored (message, time, stack
trace, etc), but one audit trail may differ widely
from another. For example, in a brokerage system, an
audit record for a buy order will differ significantly
from an audit record for a customer registering on the
system. This information would also need to be
captured relationally (I know log4j has some jdbc
appenders)

Where log4J would still come in handy is in its
configuration of categories. The ability to turn on
and off audit trails (a requirement of the system)
could probably be handled through log4j's
configuration of categories.

However, given the differences, does log4j still make
sense for auditing? In Paul Glezen's article "Adding
conversion characters to patternlayout" he extends 6
classes just to log some new information -- if
auditing has a heavy "information extension"
requirement, perhaps log4j doesn't fit the bill in
this case.  Thanks for any thoughts on this.

Noah

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