Customer Case Study: Building a User Audit System with LogdyPro

A growing project management SaaS platform targeted at a specific bussiness domain approached us with a challenge: could LogdyPro serve as the foundation for their application audit system? This request immediately resonated with us, as audit logs perfectly align with the type of data LogdyPro was designed to handle efficiently.

LogdyPro's immutable log storage capabilities provide the ideal solution for audit systems, offering:

• High-volume data handling with exceptional compression rates (seeing 15-20x reduction is a common case)
• Immutable storage ensuring logs cannot be tampered with — critical for compliance
• Efficient querying across massive datasets without performance degradation
• Cost-effective long-term retention through optimized storage architecture
• Seamless integration with existing infrastructure and workflows

These features make LogdyPro particularly valuable for SaaS applications requiring robust audit trails while maintaining cost efficiency and performance.

What is a User Audit System?

Audit logs function as a centralized stream of user activity that security and compliance teams rely on to monitor information access, especially when investigating suspicious activities or during incident reviews. At first glance, they appear as simple entries containing events, timestamps, and payloads.

However, on a deeper level, they serve as comprehensive summaries that, when viewed collectively, create a detailed frame-by-frame narrative of system activities. This fine-grain audit trail provides organizations with complete visibility into who accessed what information, when, and how—essential for both security and regulatory compliance.

TIP

You can read more about what a user audit system is and why it's important for SaaS products.

Calculating ROI

The customer shared compelling data about their audit logging challenges. Their system was generating approximately 50GB of audit logs daily, and compliance requirements mandated a 12-month retention period. This volume was pushing them to the edge of profitability, forcing them to pass additional costs to customers based on their audit data production—creating friction in both sales and customer relationships.

We collaborated to design a comprehensive ROI analysis that demonstrated how quickly the LogdyPro investment would deliver returns.

Their existing solution relied on a PostgreSQL deployment costing approximately $2,000 monthly to store their audit log data. This approach was neither scalable nor cost-effective as their customer base grew.

LogdyPro's implementation delivered transformative results:

• 25x compression rate for their audit log data, dramatically reducing storage requirements
• Simplified architecture eliminating the need for complex database management
• Reduced operational overhead through LogdyPro's managed service approach

Let's examine the concrete financial impact through a straightforward calculation. Assuming the system has been operating for 12 months (requiring storage of a full year's data):

Without LogdyPro:
- 50GB × 365 days = 18,250GB (18.25TB) stored annually
- PostgreSQL cost: ~$2,000 monthly ($24,000 annually)

With LogdyPro:
- 18,250GB ÷ 25 (compression ratio) = 730GB stored annually
- 730GB × $0.015 (Cloudflare R2 storage cost) = $10.95 monthly storage cost ($132 annually)

The result: storing over 18TB of audit log data now costs just $11 per month instead of $2,000—a 99.5% cost reduction.

This savings allowed the customer to:

1. Include comprehensive audit logging as a standard feature rather than an expensive add-on
2. Maintain healthy profit margins while meeting compliance requirements
3. Redirect the saved engineering and infrastructure resources toward core product development

Technical Implementation Details

The implementation process leveraged LogdyPro's flexible architecture to integrate seamlessly with the customer's existing technology stack. Their infrastructure followed a typical microservices pattern with various domain-specific services, databases, and message queues.

We designed a streamlined approach that added minimal complexity to their architecture:

1. Integration with Existing Workflows: Since the customer already routed all audit logs to a message queue, we simply added another consumer to direct these events to the LogdyPro ingestion service. This non-invasive approach required minimal changes to their existing systems.

2. Schema-Agnostic Storage: When the customer mentioned they maintained schemas for the metadata object in each event, we highlighted one of LogdyPro's key advantages—its ability to efficiently handle dynamic objects without rigid schema requirements. This flexibility eliminated the need for complex schema management while maintaining query performance.

A typical event consumed from their queue follows this structure:

{
   "ts":"unix timestamp",
   "user_id":6739370,
   "company_id":3784,
   "ua":"user agent string",
   "user_ip":"user IP address",
   "event":"event name, like: user.created.task",
   "event_id": "e7d54c12-8a3b-4f8a-9e3f-d2c1a4b5e6f7",
   "metadata": {
    // additional metadata properties
    "task_id": 3424646,
    "project_id": 859
   }
}

The query API provides flexible search capabilities while remaining straightforward:

GET /v1/logs/query
{
    "from": "2024-04-01T00:00:00.000Z",
    "to": "2024-04-02T00:00:00.000Z",
    "company_id": "57867",

    // optional fields
    "user_id": "4556",
    "event": "task.created",
}

This implementation delivers powerful querying capabilities without requiring complex query languages or specialized knowledge, making it accessible to various teams within the organization.

Key Outcomes and Future Expansion

The successful implementation of LogdyPro as the foundation for the customer's audit system has delivered immediate value while opening new possibilities:

Immediate Benefits

• 99.5% reduction in storage costs for audit data
• Simplified compliance reporting through comprehensive and easily queryable audit trails
• Reduced engineering maintenance by eliminating complex database management
• Enhanced performance for both log ingestion and querying operations

Expanding Implementation

Building on this success, the customer is now exploring additional applications of LogdyPro's immutable storage capabilities across their platform:

1. Change History Tracking: Implementing comprehensive history tracking for projects and tasks, allowing users to view complete modification timelines without performance penalties

2. Activity Feeds: Creating personalized activity streams that show relevant changes across the platform for each user

3. Compliance Reporting: Developing automated compliance reports that leverage the audit data for regulatory submissions

4. Security Analytics: Building advanced security monitoring that analyzes patterns in the audit data to detect potential threats or anomalous behavior

By leveraging LogdyPro's efficient immutable storage beyond traditional audit logging, the customer is discovering new ways to enhance their product offerings while maintaining their newly optimized cost structure.

This case study demonstrates how specialized infrastructure like LogdyPro can transform challenging technical requirements from cost centers into opportunities for product differentiation and business growth.

Interested in using LogdyPro? Let's get in contact!