Audit Logging Best Practices?

[Bob Pinna]

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