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

[Chad La Joie]

Thanks.  We use Logback for a product with modestly large deployment.  I
have an audit log now but I'm not entirely happy with it.  Event-based
log entries would be a large step in the right direction.

Anders Hammar wrote:
> 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
>>> _______________________________________________
>>> Logback-user mailing list
>>> Logback-user at qos.ch
>>> http://qos.ch/mailman/listinfo/logback-user
>> --
>> SWITCH
>> Serving Swiss Universities
>> --------------------------
>> Chad La Joie, Software Engineer, Net Services
>> Werdstrasse 2, P.O. Box, 8021 Zürich, Switzerland
>> phone +41 44 268 15 75, fax +41 44 268 15 68
>> chad.lajoie at switch.ch, http://www.switch.ch
>>
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SWITCH
Serving Swiss Universities
--------------------------
Chad La Joie, Software Engineer, Net Services
Werdstrasse 2, P.O. Box, 8021 Zürich, Switzerland
phone +41 44 268 15 75, fax +41 44 268 15 68
chad.lajoie at switch.ch, http://www.switch.ch