I've developed about a dozen apps in various industries over my career, and every one of them had a different solution for app-level event logging. I'm talking about tracking business-relevant events within the app, with the express intent of those logs being viewed and utilized by the end users of said app. For example, if my app handles blog posts, the users might have an audit log that track edits to those posts (who made, them, when, what changed, etc.)

Each time this need came up, the ultimate solution we picked fell into one of two camps (or a little of both): open source libraries (usually tied to language ecosystem), and/or roll-your-own minimalist solutions tailored to the specific logging needs.

Over the years I've looked for a vendor-based solution to this need, but I always wind up looking at the same heavyweight "log & monitor any/every thing" approaches, such as Splunk, Dynatrace, ELK stack, New Relic, etc. etc. These allow tremendous logging capability, but cost a fortune (time, money, or both) and are ultimately overkill to deliver on a user-facing feature for audit log visibility.

I'm looking for a solution I can carry from one project to the next, and ideally offload the deep audit log research/reporting to a third party. Am I alone in this need? Has anyone found solutions that fit the bill described above?