What is an audit log?

An audit log is an immutable, chronological record of “who did what, and when” inside your application.

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Why SaaS products need one

Business customers ask for audit logs constantly:

• “Who deleted that record?”
• “Who changed the billing plan?”
• “Who invited that user last week?”

It is both a trust feature and a compliance requirement. SOC 2, HIPAA, and GDPR all mandate some form of audit trail, and enterprise buyers will block a deal until it exists.

What a good audit event captures

Field	Example	Purpose
Actor	Alice (user_123)	Who did it
Action	invoice.deleted	What happened
Resource	Invoice #1042 (inv_456)	What was affected
Timestamp	2026-05-13T10:23:00Z	When it happened
Organization	org_789	Which tenant (for multi-tenant SaaS)
Metadata	{ "ip": "203.0.113.42" }	Additional context

Why it is hard to build yourself

Storing rows in a Postgres table is easy. Making it production-grade is not:

• Async ingestion — logging must never block your main app thread
• Zero data loss — a missing audit event is a compliance failure, not a bug
• Queryability at scale — searching millions of events by actor, action, or date must stay fast
• Retention management — old events need automatic expiry per-tenant, per-plan
• Immutability — events must not be editable after creation
• Ongoing maintenance — it is never truly done; requirements keep expanding

Developers who have built audit logs report spending days to a month on the initial build, then continuing to patch it afterwards.

How Auditledge handles it

You send one POST request per event. Auditledge handles storage, querying, retention, and the dashboard your team uses to investigate activity. No infrastructure to manage, no schema to maintain.

curl -X POST https://api.auditledge.com/v1/events \
  -H "Authorization: Bearer al_your_key_here" \
  -H "Content-Type: application/json" \
  -d '{
    "actor":    { "id": "user_123", "name": "Alice" },
    "action":   "invoice.deleted",
    "resource": { "type": "invoice", "id": "inv_456" },
    "organization_id": "org_789"
  }'

→ Quickstart → Event schema