[logback-user] Feedback from using Logback in an audit component

[Anders Hammar]

I was asked by Ceki to share my successful Logback story with you all.

In a former assignment for one of our customers, we implemented an
audit component. The customer is to use this component in their
applications to audit end-user activities.

In some earlier application specific audit implementations, log4j had
been used. However, log4j (and pretty much all existing application
logging frameworks that I looked at) has the notion of logging levels.
For auditing (at least in this customer's case) we have actions/events
which have no relation between them. So, having levels of debug, info,
warn, etc isn't right but we rather have independent events.
When I found Logback it was kind of love at first sight, the modular
design fitted beautifully with what we wanted and we chose Logback
(specifically logback-core) for our actual audit logging. We based
this choice on two factors in specific:
1. The possibility of log on actions/events rather than levels (as
above described)
2. The possiblity of having several independently configured logback
instances. (This is not possible with log4j for instance, and as the
customer's app server of choice uses log4j we would need to combine
application logging and audit logging configuration - which is not
good out of security perspective.)

Also, the extensive documentation made my work easy to recommend the
framework. As we all know, good documentation is not always the case
in OSS. However, as mentioned on the mailing list earlier, the lack of
a 1.0 release could have been a problem. However, Ceki's track record
(with log4j) made me feel safe still going with Logback.

As i personally strongly believe in OSS I normally participate and
contribute to the community of the libs I use. However, working as a
consultant I just can't be involved in everything and tend to only
stay active as long as the assignment lasts (there are a few
exceptions). Therefore I don't subscribe to this mailing list any
longer, but I will monitor this thread so if you have any questions
regarding my use case I'll be happy to answer them.

/Anders