Show HN: Rethinking audit trails in Django (structured and database-free)

6 points by shree256 15 hours ago

We were using django-easy-audit to track CRUD and API events in Django. The problem: every action meant an extra database write, which slowed transactions, increased infra costs, and left us with audit tables that weren’t great for analytics.

I built django-activity-audit (PyPI) to fix this: - Extends Django’s logging system with custom AUDIT and API levels. - Captures CRUD + API request/response events as structured JSON logs. - Vector tails the logs and ships them into ClickHouse. - Grafana makes them queryable and visual.

This removes the extra DB writes, gives structured data ready for analysis, and keeps costs down.

Curious — how are others handling audit logging in Django (or other frameworks)? Do you log it, write it to a DB, or something else entirely?