The Surprising Complexities of Building Audit Logs - Harness IO

Audit logs are crucial for security, compliance, and troubleshooting, yet building robust audit logs presents challenges such as designing flexible structures and addressing specific use cases. Enterprises demand detailed logs to track changes, data access, and user activities for both internal usage and compliance purposes. At Split, recent enhancements to audit logs include logging all administrative activity and introducing webhooks, but designing such systems revealed complexities due to the longevity and consistency required of logs. The company learned that designing generic, consistent log structures is vital to avoid future complications with data migrations and API integrations. Audit logs differ from other use cases in terms of volume and access patterns, necessitating careful consideration of data storage and retrieval strategies. Despite the challenges, a well-thought-out audit log design can provide lasting value and support continuous improvement in feature management and experimentation.