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

[Anders Hammar]

Hi Chad,

I'm sorry to say no, my customer doesn't share code. Especially not
for this component. But due to the good design of logback this was
very straight forward. As I said, I used logback-core and implemented
a few classes on top of this. I found looking at how things were
solved in logback-classic and logback-access very helpful. I ran into
a few problems when extending some classes for our specific needs, but
I filed jiras regarding that and I believe it has been fixed in
0.9.10/11.

What I could do is sharing some kind of UML class diagram to show the
idea. I'll look at that on Monday.

/Anders

On Fri, Oct 31, 2008 at 9:45 AM, Chad La Joie <chad.lajoie at switch.ch> wrote:
> Hey Anders,
>
> Do you have any code that you could share that shows how you did the
> event-based audit logging vs the standard level-based?
>
> Anders Hammar wrote:
>> 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
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>
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